Pi-hole on emonBase?

I’m thinking of running Pi-hole. Don’t know much about it yet, but it seems like it ought to be able to run on an existing pi rather than have to buy another new one. Does anybody know whether it would run on my emonBase without causing grief?

Hi Dave,

I’ve installed only two pihole…
Short answer, I don’t know as I haven’t tried running both on the same pi.

But given the changes to the networking options and webserver the install process makes, and given how important the DNS and/or DHCP servers are running on a pihole, I would prefer to separate them out physically. Otherwise debugging could get chaotic!

I found pihole works great on Pi v2 and above. v1 struggles alot.

Thanks Dan. I’ve read a little more now and it does seem a bit more complicated than I had first thought. But it does seem like pi-hole shouldn’t really need a whole dedicated pi to run. Maybe I’ll try installing it first on a test pi to get to understand it and then move to it whatever permanent home proves appropriate.

I know that EmonHub coexists with other Pi stuff because that’s how mine runs. I don’t run the full CMS, just EmonHub and the mqtt broker. (I use Home Assistant running in a virtual machine elsewhere). I just installed emonHub on a Pi 3B that was running Docker for some other sensors. It also has a Lifepo4wered UPS hat as well.

Pi-hole running well here alongside emonPi on a rather old Pi2.

When I prepared to install pi-hole in 2019 I first ran some manual package updates (PHP and so on), then installed the missing packages from pi-hole’s dependency list so I knew what changed in case the emon software got upset, but there was no trouble.

Pi-hole install was pretty standard apart from telling it not to install a webserver. It installs its own directories under /var/www and these work fine with the apache2 that comes with emonPi.

Many thanks Steve.

Ironically, although I have 2 computers, phones, tablets etc on the network the most frequent entry (by a long way) in pi-hole’s query log is localhost looking up emoncms.org. Both IPv4 and IPv6, every 30 seconds, 24/7. Something not caching like it should?

Would add that PiHole is the one bit of software I look back and think “how did I live without it?!”

I’ve gone as far as to set up a VPN at home so my mobile can always use the PiHole server back at home, even when on a 4G connection out and about. No more ads in any Android apps or websites. Only thing it can’t do is kill off adverts on YouTube.

I’ve installed PiHole on my emonPi. I wrote a short tutorial. You can find it here PiHole and EmonCMS on emonPi – Hpatoio

Feedback are welcome