pihole-steroids

Creating a personal DNS server with ad blocking and encrypted queries

  1. Install and configure Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi (or any other computer)

  2. Configure this adblock list for Pi-Hole: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/notracking/hosts-blocklists/master/dnscrypt-proxy/dnscrypt-proxy.blacklist.txt

  3. Install dnscrypt-proxy client on Pi-Hole server

  4. Set Pi-Hole upstream DNS to use local dnscrypt-proxy

  5. Profit!

Pihole settings

Settings --> DNS : tells PiHole to use dnscrypt-proxy as upstream, so only encrypted DNS queries are used over WAN

Settings --> API/Web Interface --> CPU Temperature Unit : set temp to use Farenheit

Pihole stats

echo ">stats" | nc localhost 4711

Pihole config files

/etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.conf

ANALYZE_ONLY_A_AND_AAAA=true
AAAA_QUERY_ANALYSIS=true
RESOLVE_IPV6=false

PRIVACYLEVEL=0

/etc/pihole/setupVars.conf

WARN: this should rarely need to be modified by hand, it's usually generated from values set in Admin Console

Things I had to set manually, since they changed after the initial install

PIHOLE_INTERFACE=eth0
IPV4_ADDRESS=192.168.11.10/16
WEBPASSWORD=      #leave this empty if you don't care about password protection for admin console

Pihole commands

  • pihole -c == Chronometer: realtime stats

  • pihole -up == Update Pihole application

  • pihole -g == Force manual Galaxy db update (should be automatically scheduled to update weekly)

  • pihole -t == Realtime tail of pihole log, color-formatted version of /var/log/pihole.log

  • pihole status == Returns status of DNS service as well as ad-blocking feature

  • pihole restartdns == restart pihole-FTL and pihole services

Query database

Reference:

  • https://docs.pi-hole.net/database/ftl/

Queries table

Schema

Field
Type
Allow NULLs
Description

id

integer

No

autoincrement ID for the table, only used by SQLite3

timestamp

integer

No

Unix timestamp when this query arrived at FTLDNS (used as index)

type

integer

No

Type of this query (Ex: A, CNAME, MX)

status

integer

No

How this query was handled by FTLDNS (see Supported status types below)

domain

text

No

Requested domain

client

text

No

Requesting client (IP address)

forward

text

Yes

DNS host that query was forwarded to

additional_info

blob

Yes

Data-dependent content, not often used

Query type values

ID
Query type

1

A

2

AAAA

3

ANY

4

SRV

5

SOA

6

PTR

7

TXT

8

NAPTR

9

MX

10

DS

11

RRSIG

12

DNSKEY

13

NS

14

OTHER (any query type not covered elsewhere)

15

SVCB

16

HTTPS

Status values

ID
Status
Block/Allow
Details

0

Unknown

❔

Unknown status (not yet known)

1

Blocked

❌

Domain contained in gravity database

2

Allowed

✅

Forwarded

3

Allowed

✅

Known, replied to from cache

4

Blocked

❌

Domain matched by a regex blacklist filter

5

Blocked

❌

Domain contained in exact blacklist

6

Blocked

❌

By upstream server (known blocking page IP address)

7

Blocked

❌

By upstream server (0.0.0.0 or ::)

8

Blocked

❌

By upstream server (NXDOMAIN with RA bit unset)

9

Blocked

❌

Domain contained in gravity database - Blocked during deep CNAME inspection

10

Blocked

❌

Domain matched by a regex blacklist filter - Blocked during deep CNAME inspection

11

Blocked

❌

Domain contained in exact blacklist - Blocked during deep CNAME inspection

12

Allowed

✅

Retried query

13

Allowed

✅

Retried but ignored query (typically related to DNSSEC validation)

14

Allowed

✅

Already forwarded, not forwarding again. Request was sent but hasn't received an answer

Example queries

  • SELECT datetime(timestamp),domain,client FROM queries WHERE status IN( 12, 14) ORDER BY timestamp DESC LIMIT 10

  • SELECT COUNT(*) FROM queries WHERE status IN( 12, 14) AND timestamp > strftime('%s','2021-11-01') AND timestamp < strftime('%s','2021-11-06');

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