I present an alternative way to use Pi-hole outside the home network by leveraging Encrypted DNS (aka DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS) instead of the usual VPN.
I do exactly this as well. Works great! Dynamic DNS is kind of a hilarious hack.
Quick question: since I use wireguard, do I need to use DNS-over-HTTPS for security? My assumption is that my entire session is already encrypted with my wireguard keys, so it doesn’t matter. But I figured I should double check.
Depends, do you have pihole/unbound setup to only recursively resolve? Or do you forward requests to an upstream (either as a fallback or just as a primary). If that’s the case, and depending on your threat model, you’ll want to set up DoH or DoT as your DNS requests will be forwarded in plaintext
I have ddns on Cloudflare.
It works great, until your home IP changes.
After that wireguard will happily hammer the old IP, till something breaks the tunnel and it reestablishes it to the new IP.
Working as intended.
My workaround was forcing the IP change over night while everyone was home.
Use ddns on your router with a domain so you can then get something like wireguard.example.com and then use that as the endpoint in your wireguard.
Set the wireguard DNS as your pihole.
To make life easier set your home network IP space to something that another WiFi would never use, ie 192.168.46.xx
That way it will never conflict if you are on a public WiFi and you can access anything on your home lab when you need.
I’ve been using this setup for years on laptop, phone etc
I do exactly this as well. Works great! Dynamic DNS is kind of a hilarious hack.
Quick question: since I use wireguard, do I need to use DNS-over-HTTPS for security? My assumption is that my entire session is already encrypted with my wireguard keys, so it doesn’t matter. But I figured I should double check.
Depends, do you have pihole/unbound setup to only recursively resolve? Or do you forward requests to an upstream (either as a fallback or just as a primary). If that’s the case, and depending on your threat model, you’ll want to set up DoH or DoT as your DNS requests will be forwarded in plaintext
I have ddns on Cloudflare. It works great, until your home IP changes. After that wireguard will happily hammer the old IP, till something breaks the tunnel and it reestablishes it to the new IP. Working as intended. My workaround was forcing the IP change over night while everyone was home.
Tailscale sorts all the issues I had.