So, check this little idea that I have - I want to browse the internet without all sorts of unscrupulous actors collecting every little bit of metadata on me and my family they can possibly get their hands on.
Literally just had my pihole hard crash this weekend due to a bad update to FTL. Apparently they had a major version upgrade and didn’t bother to read the notes so I had to do a full OS reinstall.
Back up your configs people. Had to dig through documentation to find the sqlite file and then parse through it like some sort of animal.
Literally just had my pihole hard crash this weekend due to a bad update to FTL. Apparently they had a major version upgrade and didn’t bother to read the notes so I had to do a full OS reinstall.
The v6 upgrade was such a disaster. I was bitten by it too, it started the upgrade then halfway through decided it didn’t like my OS (debian-testing) and crapped out … leaving me with a b0rked installation. Luckily I was able to return to v5 using my system backup. It was a right pain to figure out how to restore though, because they write files all over /opt, /etc, /usr/bin, /usr/local and /var.
For this reason I have since dockerized my pihole installation. Not only does this allow you to choose the exact pihole version you want (a bare metal install only supports the latest version), but it allows you to centralize your configuration files neatly under a docker volume, so you only have to backup the volume.
I waffled back and forth on a docker install. Outside of the initial panic to reinstall the OS (Ubuntu 24.04 for me), it was relatively straightforward outside of the config. It may be worth it to dockerize it so I can git control the config but not sure how easy it is under v6. They really changed how the files are parsed.
Before pihole was essentially a frontend for dnsmasq but it seems like it’s a bit more than that now. I haven’t had the chance to look too much under the hood.
If I’m being honest, I’ve wanted to off-load pihole to my router but lack the time and patience these days. I’ve reached the point in my life where IT isn’t the most important thing anymore and just need it to work.
Literally just had my pihole hard crash this weekend due to a bad update to FTL. Apparently they had a major version upgrade and didn’t bother to read the notes so I had to do a full OS reinstall.
Back up your configs people. Had to dig through documentation to find the sqlite file and then parse through it like some sort of animal.
The v6 upgrade was such a disaster. I was bitten by it too, it started the upgrade then halfway through decided it didn’t like my OS (debian-testing) and crapped out … leaving me with a b0rked installation. Luckily I was able to return to v5 using my system backup. It was a right pain to figure out how to restore though, because they write files all over /opt, /etc, /usr/bin, /usr/local and /var.
For this reason I have since dockerized my pihole installation. Not only does this allow you to choose the exact pihole version you want (a bare metal install only supports the latest version), but it allows you to centralize your configuration files neatly under a docker volume, so you only have to backup the volume.
I waffled back and forth on a docker install. Outside of the initial panic to reinstall the OS (Ubuntu 24.04 for me), it was relatively straightforward outside of the config. It may be worth it to dockerize it so I can git control the config but not sure how easy it is under v6. They really changed how the files are parsed.
Before pihole was essentially a frontend for dnsmasq but it seems like it’s a bit more than that now. I haven’t had the chance to look too much under the hood.
If I’m being honest, I’ve wanted to off-load pihole to my router but lack the time and patience these days. I’ve reached the point in my life where IT isn’t the most important thing anymore and just need it to work.