Yup, running it on a pi 4. Simple to set up and use, happy with it. I didn't know about Adguard but I don't want to try it even if it seems good.

I've been using it for years and love it. .Net based, so it is cross platform, too! There's a docker image if you want to go that route.

And you can load the ad blocking lists into anyway so you get solid DNS, ad blocking and none of those random youtube spinners from rando dns issues. For nothing but a little configuration.

This looks great.

Qs: this says “ Technitium DNS Server is an open source authoritative as well as recursive DNS server”

Are pi-hole/Adgyard also recursive DNS server or just a blockers?

Edit: I’ve been using pi-hole for ages, trying to figure out if this has any advantage.

Can't speak to Adguard:

PiHole isn't natively recursive, but you can easily set up a service alongside pihole on the pi (or in another docker, if your pihole is a container) called Unbound which provides recursive DNS.

Thanks, I’ll take a look at Unbound. I have it running on a Pi.

I had a pfsense, which died a few days ago while upgrading from 2.6 to 2.7. I believe it was running Unbound.

Decided against it due to being written in C#/NET and being relatively new. Went with Unbound

Why?

Because it’s written in C# and relatively new. Unbound is written in C so should consume less resources, has been around longer and has been vetted – FreeBSD and OpenBSD replaced BIND with Unbound.

The one downside to Unbound is that there’s no GUI so it can be a bit intimidating to set up. But the docs are excellent and Unbound defaults are secure, so it’s not as hard as it seems.

I don't mind the new argument but C# is one of the very few "high-level" languages you can implement something like a DNS server well with.