We’re very happy to announce the release of v4.1 of Pi-hole. We’d also like to thank our Patrons for their continued support as our project would be very difficult to maintain without your patronage.

What’s New In v4.1?

DNS Cache Information

We added cache information to the Settings page. This allows users to get a quick overview if their DNS cache size is sufficient or even too large. You may be curious to know that the cache-size for FTLDNS can be set to any value you like, while versions of dnsmasq < 2.80 are hardcoded to accept a limit of 10,000.

You can query a new endpoint for this information (api.php?getCacheInfo).

Improved DNS Server Settings Tab

We’ve added more detailed selections for the services offered by Quad9, including ECS (Extended Client Subnet), which is meant to help improve CDN performance.

Query Types In Long-term Stats

We added a method to select the query types to be queried from the long-term stats.

Privacy Level 4

We’ve added a new privacy level, which disables all statistics processing. Even the query counters will not be available. Additionally, you can disable logging to the file /var/log/pihole.log using sudo pihole logging off.

Note that – due to the disabled query processing – regex blocking is not available on level 4.

Start pihole-FTL As root If Capabilities Are Not Supported By The System

We now check if the kernel / file system supports Linux capabilities before trying to start pihole-FTLas an unprivileged user and binding to port 53. This checks if the setcap command succeeded and only tries to start pihole-FTL as an unprivileged user application if this is the case (this should almost always be the case).

Since we had several users confirm that running pihole-FTL as root works just fine in these edge cases, we set it to fall back to starting pihole-FTL under root (as it is done for dnsmasq). So if you had previously been editing your service files, you should no longer need to do so.

Side note: For anyone new to Pi-hole, pihole-FTL , FTL, and FTLDNS are synonymous. I think we will eventually switch over to using FTLDNS exclusively. But pihole-FTL has always been the name of the daemon and we more recently decided to call our fork of dnsmasq, FTLDNS.

Fixes, Tweaks, And Improvements

• Improved the Wrong Token message
• Don’t require ad lists to start in http (this is for display in the Web interface)
• Improved the speed of the enable/disable method
• Fixed Chronometer heading alignment
• and more…