I set up dual redundant pi-holes on raspberry pi 4s on my home network but switching all devices to NextDNS would give me access to filtered DNS even when away from home, plus save me the trouble of running two raspis (including two Ubuntu instances) just for that purpose.
Could anyone knowledgeable in such things suggest any downsides to a wholesale switch?
NextDNS Pros:
* Can use NextDNS on any network (thanks to their apps or just regular DNS-over-HTTP/TLS).
* (Could get similar functionality on PiHole with a remote hosted PiHole + VPN, but much more complex to setup)
* NextDNS allows for multiple different configuration setups per account (so you can fine-tune your blocking/filtering differently for different devices).
* (PiHole AFIK only supports a single configuration)
* NextDNS IMHO had the superior UI. With more powerful config options.
* In reality with some extra manual config/coding you could probably get PiHole to do most of what is in the config for NextDNS, but it would take some work.
PiHole Pros:
* PiHole is open source.
* The NextDNS server code is closed-source, but they do have an open-source CLI client.
* PiHole is self-hosted (much better from a privacy perspective).
* But you do get all the downsides of being responsible for hosting something as central as a DNS server yourself...+Pihole is free and open. It is also yours to build,manage,customize as you please.
-NextDNS is also further away, meaning there will be much more latency for all your DNS queries. It is usually best to run your own resolver, or have a local DNS server in your network.
+Pihole sits on a device on your network. You can also enable recursion directly on the pihole by installing Unbound on the same device.
But your local PI resolver would likely have to pass on your request to an upstream DNS server if it isn't cached. Although its negligible, this extra hop would add latency. This is assuming the result isn't in the OS or browser DNS cache.
There are tons of important details to keeping a critical service up and running almost all the time - even if you are competent in this, that is still time every month making sure it's running, secure and functional.
The only reasons in my opinion to DIY a solution would be a) learning, hobby or for fun or b) you have requirements that can't be met another way, like privacy goals.
Running NextDNS has costs. Given the absence of fees for using NextDNS, it has a commercial interest in collecting information about users. Like other third party DNS providers (middlemen), e.g., Google or Cisco/OpenDNS, NextDNS supports ENDS Client-Subnet. This extension has zero value in terms of ad-blocking and privacy and arguably should be "off" by default unless the user asks for it.
PiHole is non-commercial project AFAIK, although they have registered a trademark.
Third party DNS caches will always be inferior to DIY in respect of certain issues such as ad-blocking, privacy, security, reliablity, etc. (I am a DIY-er and when third party DNS has an outage, the applications I use are still able to use the internet without any problems because I have zero reliance of third party DNS providers.) When using third party DNS these factors are outside the user's control. Users cannot tell third party DNS providers what to do, nor can they execute quality control, they can only accept what is offered to them. Of course, third party DNS will always be superior in terms of convenience and perhaps "features". I personally do not need all of the "features" offered by third party DNS, but I cannot speak for other users.
The user's "choice" between DIY and third party DNS depends on what is important to the user and what the user is capable of doing herself. When the user is not capable of running DNS software herself, then DIY is removed from consideration and the "choice" is simply between one third party provider or another. The user has very little control in that situation.
When it comes to DNS, for me nothing beats having control. For me, "control", not convenience, is the best feature. I prefer whitelist to blocklist. Every user is different.
Having said that it's free (beta) right now so that's a statement of fact and by no means a complaint
The only issue's I've had is:
1. Epic Game Store was blocked - not an issue now as I uninstalled it and bought Borderlands 3 on steam. Now EGS is blocked again.
2. Adverts display in Google now that I don't have an ad-block, but it prevents me clicking them so I'm not fussed.
3. raygun.io is blocked - not sure why as it doesn't track any information of value as it's primarily used for crash reporting, and they are GDPR compliant.
Other than that, this has been amazing. I'm definitely going to be a paid customer once its out of beta.
adguard pro allows customization of dns servers (including DoT), has a running local log of dns queries, and provides custom whitelists/blacklists functionality. their dns (or maybe the app) very occasionally hangs requests, making my device seem like it's disconnected.
i've considered switching to nextdns but haven't found a compelling reason yet.
I've been using it too, but I've found nextdns go down from time to time. How are you dealing with explaining how to change the DNS setting to people at home because "internet doesn't work"? I wish DoH client implementations had support for primary and secondary endpoints [0]. I've seen people straight up uninstall DoH clients from their devices in frustration.
I must point out that the Android implementation for DoT does fallback to OS or network provided DNS resolver (usually, dns.google), and that's a saving grace [1]. And so, I have no reservations setting up nextdns for everyone on the Androids.
Fwiw, I've found running DoH with Stackpath Edge Engine and Cloudflare Workers to be quite trouble-free, but it isn't for everyone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22414433
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[0] Nebulo (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.frostnerd....) is the only Android DoH client I've seen support this.
[1] Speaking of DoH instead: Google's https://getintra.org falls back to last-known good DoH resolver, but then, never (?) switches back to primary unless restarted, from what I can recall.
I may be mistaken here but I thought the reason almost all operating systems allow you to specify more than one DNS is in case the primary one goes down. So if you specify NextDNS as the primary and say, Google or whatever, as the secondary: you likely won't see downtime (but obviously the filtering will disappear until the primary one comes back up and/or DNS caches reset etc)
For example, my default Kubuntu 19.10 installation flips the primary and secondary if the primary is unresponsive for a while. Since my laptop takes a moment to establish a WiFi connection upon waking up, it always decides that the primary server is down and to default to the secondary server. It has currently been 3½ hours since my laptop queried its primary server and it has queried the secondary server over 1000 times in the past 24 hours despite the primary having 100% uptime.
Most stub resolvers have an option to use strict order, but you can't rely on it as a network admin.
Android 9 and later natively supports "Private DNS" which is DNS over TLS.
All work fine with NextDNS and I have multiple profiles for each hardware I use it on. Eg, I use more block lists on my phone than my other devices.
I'm using https://github.com/dimkr/nss-tls with https://github.com/dimkr/dohli on Linux and it works well. Everything, not just the browser, uses DoH and with endless customization, since I own the server.
You can use it as-is but if you want user-specific configuration you'll get a custom URL that looks something like "https://dns.nextdns.io/c8g88a", and whatever comes in that way will use your settings and will be logged as per your configuration (of course, you can disable logging).