I’ve been tinkering with pihole at home with a thought to throwing it live across the home network, however prior to that I’ve been planning to rebuild the network to be more orderly.
I finally got motivated last night, so I created a spreadsheet of my intended network layout (reservations, spaces for growth, DHCP pool) and set about changing things. I managed to make all the changes quietly in the background, so the only notice anyone took was when I had to “reboot” the lights by turning them off and on again.
I learned that I should also draw up a change plan, so I’d remember things like when the VM moves, all sensor end points need to move, DNS moves and VPN moves, and many of those need config changes.
Next step was mirroring the DHCP setup from the modem to the pihole, for future switching of what handles the DHCP. Even just pointing the modem DHCP DNS to the pihole significantly improved modem responsiveness.
Finally, throw open the whole home network to use the pihole for DNS, and see what happens. Realise that one client NEEDS ad network URLs to work, and scramble to learn how to make that happen on the pihole.