Pihole v6 Review
i switched so you don’t have to
In my last article, I mentioned that I might try out Pihole v6 in my home network. I decided I would bit the bullet and switch from Controld to Pihole temporarily.
How did it go?
The good
Pihole is pretty solid at this point. My test setup is an Oracle Cloud ARM instance with 2 CPUs and 16 GB RAM. It’s pretty beefy and works well. The setup is definitely overkill.
I appreciate that adblock style lists are now supported. Another huge improvement is allowlist support! Local DNS records continue to work well.
The dashboard has been improved too.
Yes, I have 1.3 mil domains on my list (you can see the lists I use here). About 9.4% of my traffic is filtered.
A lot of traffic is hitting the cache (which is awesome for me). I am using quad9 as my upstream.
Over the last few days, my latency has been very low (tbf it has been super clear out which helps dishy a lot).
My average latency has been roughly 22ms since I switched. Controld was sitting at roughly 25ms.
The bad
This is not a knock on anyone or anything, but when I installed pihole v6 as a fresh install, I selected quad9 as the upstream. When I logged into the dashboard, I saw that there was no upstream selected?!
I also noticed that after a pihole update (of which there have been a few since the initial release) a password was added to my dashboard. I previously did not have one set.
Also, sometimes when I hit the dashboard, it doesn’t load on the first go. It only loads after I refresh. Smoll things for sure.
The ugly
Nothing ugly here. Although it seems like there were a few hiccups with initial release (never trust a v*.0) pihole has been running like a champ.
Will I switch to pihole v6 permanently?
No.
Controld still has my loyalty. There are several features that they offer which pihole does not.
Pihole v6 is a huge improvement from v5, but it just doesn’t seem to bring the product up to speed with other DNS resolvers. If you want a boring, solid product. Pihole is the way to go.
Cheers,
Joe