I have an asus router with a pi-hole on the network.
I was doing some work on my server and noticed that when pi-hole was down, I couldn’t access the internet. I was looking for some ideas online how to deal with this, but they said to have a second pihole on the network in case one is offline. Is that the only way to do it? Is there any way to have the network go back to normal if the pihole is offline?
Use something like AdGuard or NextDNS as your secondary resolverCheck out the comment by @AtariDump@lemmy.world
Primary and secondary dns is not a thing. There is no priority for DNS. Depending on the device it will use ether address and will only try the other on failure.
Windows calls them ‘preferred’ and ‘alternate’ DNS servers. That roughly translates to primary/secondary.
It does not.
Yeah, that’s how they are named, my experience showed that the devices used whichever of the two they wanted.
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).
Damn, fuck Windows. Fortunately I don’t have to use it.
That’s exactly what I do, since I never had any stability issues with my Pihole.