John Turner

Setting Up a new Pi Hole

My personal steps on setting up a new instance of Pi Hole on a Raspberry Pi, specifically one that will communicate correctly with my other Pis, act as a reverse proxy, etc…

Steps

  1. Ensure that the Raspberry Pi is set up according to Setting Up a New Raspberry Pi
    1. Important: Ensure that the RPi has a static IP and it’s set up in your network DHCP settings to be a DNS server
  2. Follow the installation instructions found here
  3. Change the password via the commandline: pihole -a -p
  4. Log in and restore from a Pi Hole backup
  5. Create / update the /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.conf file (see below for my settings)
  6. Install unbound: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/
    1. Ensure to configure unbound according to those docs ^^
  7. Configure the new Pi Hole’s DNS settings with the following adjustments:
    1. Uncheck all Upstream DNS Servers
    2. Check 1 custom Upstream DNS Server and put this IP address: 127.0.0.1#5335
    3. Make sure that “Recommended setting” is checked just below that
    4. Ensure that the following are checked:
      1. Never Forward non-FQDN A and AAAA queries
      2. Never forward reverse lookups for private IP ranges
      3. Use DNSSEC
  8. Install Gravity Sync
    1. Note: Just to make sure that everything is working as expected, I actually purge/remove Gravity Sync from all other devices and re-install across the fleet of Pi Holes that I have. This is largely due to the generation and placement of SSH keys during the Gravity Sync process.
    2. One More Note: It’s important to ensure that each Pi has a valid password set for the other pi. If not, I had to do manual SSH key passing from one machine to the next to get gravity-sync push and gravity-sync auto to work

Pi Hole Conf

#; Pi-hole FTL config file
#; Comments should start with #; to avoid issues with PHP and bash reading this file
RATE_LIMIT=3000/60
MAXDBDAYS=14
PRIVACYLEVEL=0