Hy everyone, I have a PiHole instance running on my home server, and I changed my router (Fritz box) DNS in order to use my PiHole. Everything runs great.
I was wondering if I can put another DNS provider on my “alternative DNS server” in my router, in order to have a fallback alternative in case my server is down, or if I should avoid it.
I’m asking this because I don’t know if the request will be handled in parallel between the two DNS provider (that would make my PiHole useless) or not. Thank you.
I’ve set my secondary DNS to cloudflare, and my pihole still blocked ads for me. I assumed the secondary DNS server is used only if the primary can’t be pinged. But i haven’t actually looked into it.
I have two piholes, and sometimes both will receive requests at the same time, if there’s a lot of traffic.
Afaik there is no primary and secondary, you cant tell which one to use. Its best to have 2 piholes, but having 2nd DNS set to nextdns or something like that should be fine if you cant run 2 instances, probably not the best setup tho
When it comes to a “secondary”DNS… there is nothing like a primary and secondary DNS server. These indications are quite misleading but many systems adopted it this way. Pihole only list the DNS servers as primary and secondary, because this is what the providers write on their pages. The bad phrasing is supported especially by how Windows handles it.
Most operating systems implement DNS servers as alternatives, not as fallbacks, i.e. they will query any of both servers from time to time, so it is quite likely that you will loose your Pi-hole filtering capabilities (at least partially) [if you specify a secondary DNS server on your network].
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).
Thanks for the clarification. I’ll be updating my settings.