A few of my friends experienced the glory of PiHole in my home network and asked, if I could install such a thing in their networks as well.

Which I obviously could, but none of them are interested in updating/maintaining such a device. So I would like to collect some suggestions on how to deploy such a box with (ideally) zero interaction from my side until the end of times.

My hardware platform of choice would be a cheap thin client (Futro s920 or something like that) running Ubuntu with unattended updates enabled.

Pihole itself seem to offer an auto-updater, but I’m not sure how stable that runs in the long run - maybe Docker would be better suited here?

2 points

How about to set up a device that works locally at your friends’ house as DNS server, but don’t forget to install something like zerotier, so you can access it without setting up a port forward. With that, you can help them with the maintenance of their DNS server.

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2 points

I would go a step further and use ansible to manage the devices. Set it up to auto update and you’ll have basically no maintenance.

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3 points

This is the correct answer. Takes a little bit of tinkering to setup but it’s free and works. Just make sure to change the default DNS endpoints from Cloudflare and Google to something more private.

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2 points

Rent a cheap VPS, ask your friends to gobble up the 1-2 units of local currency per month. Run a DNS over HTTPS server on the VPS (Adguard Home can do it, I’m not sure about PiHole), then just use browsers that can use a custom DoH resolver.

Don’t open port 53 to the public, that’s just asking for trouble. The bonus with this is the adblocking is in use on the go as well, and you can use the same server yourself.

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1 point

If they are will mg to spend some money they could get Adguard Home appliance.

It’s basically a commercial Pihole.

https://adguard.com/en/adguard-home/overview.html

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8 points

If they do not want to maintain and update a pihole, it is better to just use public dns, like adguard.

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