I use Windows Terminal nowadays. It feels more clunky and slow than say, foot or kitty on Linux, but it's functional.
Before, I used to use PuTTY for ssh sessions, it feels more fluid, but it needs a lot of configuring to get the terminal behavior just right, and the settings UI is really outdated. It also doesn't support WSL (unless you run sshd on WSL and ssh into the system).
That's only for a single case comparison. You can't draw statistically meaningful conclusions about what percentage of traffic the pihole has blocked over a longer period of time.
Yeah no ublock origin really won’t block all that many
Meh, it's fairly easy to check this you know. If I turn off uBlock, my pihole logs do turn red. If it's left on, pihole logs stay mostly green, with nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary getting through.
the chattiest DNS comes from apps and smart devices, windows and mac laptops etc.
I don't have many of those. My work laptop is windows but it connects through a VPN only, and I have my smartphone that I barely use at home.
Why call it secondary then, that’s so counterintuitive lol
I don't think that's even the official naming. It probably comes from what Windows 95 called it back in the day:
On Linux, it's just an additional "nameserver x.x.x.x" line in /etc/resolv.conf, with no indication of which is the "primary" or "secondary".
Your understanding is not correct. For page elements, uBlock prevents the domain from even trying to load, so no DNS request is ever made. Only if you go directly to an ad domain from the url bar (who does that?), does a DNS request get made.
For example, on my own webserver, I created a simple static html file with an tag pointing to an ad domain that I know is blocked on uBlock as well as on the pihole. Like so:
<html>
adblock test
<img src="https://track.adtrue.com/some/bannerad.png"></img>
</html>
Loading that page, uBlock showed 1 blocked ad on that page, pihole only logged a DNS request to my webserver, not to track.adtrue.com.
Once I turned off uBlock in the browser and reloaded the page, pihole did log the request to track.adtrue.com and blocked it. My browser showed a broken image.
I use firebog's ticked lists, from what I can tell from the logs ad domains are blocked just fine.
But as I said, I have ublock origin on all my browsers which already catches most ads before they reach pihole, and I don't use mobile a lot when I'm at home. Oh, and I also use Linux, so no Microsoft telemetry to block either.
1.7% makes perfect sense to me.
That's not really the point. The point this post is making is that third party software is often not available as a package for your distro. It's been a minute since I used Slackware, but I doubt you can find neatly built tgz slackware packages of Steam or the Nvidia drivers.
I know Slackware has slackbuilds and you can install sbopkg to search for packages and automatically build them, but that goes a bit beyond "just use your package manager".
The box I'm running pihole on hosts several other services as well, so I dread having to reinstall everything. Most of it is dockerized, but still.
Anyway, I also waffled back and forth on dockerizing pihole when I initially installed it ... but ended up going bare metal, and now I wish I would have gone docker from the start. The initial install is perhaps slightly more complicated, but it's so much more maintainable and transportable to other devices: transfer volumes, and run your docker-compose.yml on the other box ... and voila, you've cloned your pihole. I use that system to keep my backup pihole in sync by the way.
Before pihole was essentially a frontend for dnsmasq but it seems like it’s a bit more than that now
Indeed, it doesn't run dnsmasq separately anymore, but somehow incorporates all dnsmasq capabilities and it still uses dnsmasq syntax config files, and can be configured to include the /etc/dnsmasq.d configs.
Randomly? No, only when your pi goes down
Not how secondary DNS works. It round robins the requests across primary and secondary DNS servers.
Secondary DNS is not for redundancy!
The way secondary DNS works is that a client distributes DNS requests across the primary and secondary DNS servers. So if you have pihole as your primary DNS and, say, 8.8.8.8 as your secondary DNS, you're sending half of your DNS requests to google unfiltered. And if your pihole DNS goes down, half of your DNS queries time out.
The way to have redundancy with DNS is with a standby server that takes over the IP of the primary server if it goes down. You can do this with keepalived.
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.
Try industrial label printers. They are like printers on hard mode.