Transition from pi-hole to IPFire DBL

IPFire Projects IPFire DBL
1

I currently have pi-hole running on a VM on my network. IPFire sources DNS Server (pi-hole) to all DHCP clients with itself as a backup. Since the essence of pi-hole is now built-in to IPFire (domain ad blocking), I’d like to start transitioning to IPFire DBL and get rid of the pi-hole VM.

Does anyone have/had a similar configuration and had a smooth transition? This is for a home network, so no considerable issues if there is some downtime (but would like to avoid it). My main priorities:

  • Block obtrusive ads as pi-hole does now.
  • Some telemetry is needed to comfortably enjoy streaming services.
  • Ability to separate some DHCP clients into “open” Internet (i.e., still protected by IPFire firewall but ads, etc. still allowed for functionality).

If anyone has any experience/insight, greatly appreciate if you shared lessons learned.

Thanks.
-Ernie

2

Ernie, I think the ability to separate clients is only available in pi-hole as of now. You can find it under Groups.

IPFire could handle the DHCP and DNS requests, but I think you still need the pi-hole to separate clients into Open and restricted

3

While Pi-hole offers you the flexibility to use any (!) source, the IPFire is at the current moment bound to a fixed set of DBL(s), and those are in beta. After seeing google, GitHub, mail.com, entire AWS section blocked by IPFire DBL, I did switched off the IPFire DBL lists as sources. I do use another RPZ add-on that allows me to ingest any source, plus block TLDs (like .us, .su, .ru, etc)

4

You can allow IPs for each category. Defining groups of IPs could make it easier, but this feature isn’t implemented yet. You can suggest it in the devel mailing list or BugZilla.