Cloudflare, DuckDNS, DNSMasq
Real command output from a test machine, not a mock-up. It’s Always DNS There’s a running joke in IT: when something breaks, it’s always DNS. Like most good jokes, it’s funny because it’s true. I’ve been woken up at 3am more times than I can count, and the root cause is DNS more often than
How DNS Actually Works (And Why It’s Always DNS) Read More »
Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 5: Network-Wide Ad Blocking and DNS You Control Of all the projects in this series, Pi-hole delivers the fastest return on investment. Not in some abstract career-value sense — in the “my partner just thanked me for making the internet less annoying” sense. Within ten minutes of pointing your router at
Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 5: DNS Ad Blocking Setup Guide with Docker Read More »
Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home: Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use? I run Pi-hole on my own network; AdGuard Home’s feature set below is drawn from its documentation and community deployments, to give it a fair evaluation. They solve the same problem. They both work well. But they are not interchangeable, and the right choice
Pi-hole vs AdGuard Home (2026): Which DNS Ad Blocker Should You Use? Read More »
I will be honest upfront: running Pi-hole on Windows via WSL2 is a compromise. It works, and there are legitimate reasons to do it, but it is not the ideal deployment for network-wide DNS filtering. If you have a spare Raspberry Pi, an old laptop, or a VPS, those are all better options. Pi-hole wants
How to Install Pi-hole on Windows (WSL2 Guide) Read More »
How to Run Pi-hole in Docker (DNS Ad Blocking with Docker Compose) If you are already running Docker on your server, putting Pi-hole in a container is the obvious choice. Your DNS service gets the same isolation, portability, and reproducibility as every other service in your stack. You can version control the compose file, blow
How to Run Pi-hole in Docker (Complete Guide) Read More »
How to Install Pi-hole on Ubuntu 24.04 (Network-Wide Ad Blocking Without a Pi) Most Pi-hole guides assume you are running a Raspberry Pi. That is where the name comes from, and it is a perfectly good deployment target. But plenty of people have an Ubuntu server already running in their homelab, or a spare mini
How to Install Pi-hole on Ubuntu 24.04 Read More »
Before I set up proper internal DNS, DuckDNS was the glue holding my remote access together. I had a Raspberry Pi running a handful of services at home, a residential IP address that changed every few days, and no interest in paying for a static IP from my ISP. DuckDNS solved the problem in about
How to Set Up DuckDNS for Free Dynamic DNS (Raspberry Pi and Linux) Read More »
