Blog

NXDOMAIN And Null Blocking With FTLDNS

Pi-hole has traditionally returned a blank HTML page in place of advertisements. An alternative method is to return NXDOMAIN—no such domain. This is a behaviour you asked us to implement and we have listened. To use it, you’ll need to be running the FTLDNS beta (pihole -up if you’re already on it): echo “FTLDNS” |…
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Patreon Coming Soon: Your Feedback Requested

We’re launching a Patreon page soon, which allows you to get rewards for supporting us. Take a look at this explainer video if you are unfamiliar with it. We want your feedback on the reward levels. Please let us know what you like, what you don’t, or what you like to see. $1/month Patron Flair…
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Blocking via regex now available in FTLDNS

We have implemented GNU Extended Regular Expressions for blocking domains into FTLDNS (as used by popular tools such as egrep (or grep -E …), awk, and emacs). To try it, you need to be participating in the FTLDNS beta test (see here for more details). This is a new feature and we invite you to…
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Results of the Pi-hole User Survey

Staying Free Pi-hole will remain free in both meanings of the word: free of charge and open source. We know the survey spooked many of your fears and you may have considered several worst case scenarios. We heard you loud and clear, you don’t want us to charge money for Pi-hole and we won’t. In…
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PSA: Issue With Pi-hole, DoH, and dnsmasq

[UPDATE: 2018-04-18: 05:51] The latest version of FTLDNS (vDev-3656ba2) now fixes this issue. We have modified it to spawn child processes for handling individual TCP queries. By this, Netflix (or any other application) shouldn’t be able to claim the resolver for itself, thus solving the issue. If you have been beta testing FTLDNS, and want…
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Pi-hole User Survey

The survey is now complete. Thanks to those who contributed. Pi-hole has grown far beyond what any of us could have imagined. As Pi-hole continues to evolve, we are looking at what Pi-hole is and if it’s meeting the demands of the market. An experienced product manager has been helping us and has put together…
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Help Us Beta Test FTLDNS

In case you missed it, FTLDNS™ is Pi-hole’s Faster Than Light (FTL) daemon combined with a DNS/DHCP server (our fork of dnsmasq). So instead of installing dnsmasq as a dependency, we will be distributing all services in a single binary. This will allow us to hook into dnsmasq‘s functionality at a code- level, as well…
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Happy Pi Day! Celebrate By Helping Us With Pi-hole Stickers

More and more of you have been asking if we sell Pi-hole stickers. At the moment, we don’t because our volunteers are already strapped for time developing the project. But you can help us change that by upvoting our sticker on Unixstickers.com.

FTLDNS: Pi-hole’s Own DNS/DHCP server

What Is FTLDNS™? In a sentence, FTLDNS™ is dnsmasq blended with Pi-hole’s special sauce. We bring the two pieces of software closer together while maintaining maximum compatibility with any updates Simon adds to dnsmasq. The Problems We have used dnsmasq as our DNS/DHCP server since Pi-hole began. However, as the project has grown and evolved,…
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Pi-hole v3.3 Released: It’s “Extra” Special

Update 2018-02-20 18:05 Hi All, After a few days of pulling out our hair and troubleshooting this whitelisting issue that some of you have reported, we’re finally getting to the bottom of it. The good news is, whitelisting is not completely broken. You can still whitelist domains from the cli with no issues by calling…
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