I hope you've enjoyed this course as much as I've enjoyed sharing it with you.
We've just scratched the surface of all the things that
Pi‑hole can do and what we can learn from it.
There are more things you can do that go beyond this course.
I'll briefly explain a few of these.
The Pi‑hole documentation has an entire section on
community‑created integrations.
My last gotcha, I promise.
The way we've set it up,
it is possible for some devices on our network to bypass the Pi‑hole.
If you have a device with hard‑coded DNS server IPs,
they could reach out directly to those for DNS lookups instead of your Pi‑hole.
The workaround for that is to lock down your router so only
the Pi‑hole can make external DNS lookups.
Another bypass can be using a VPN inside your network tunneling out. Again,
you'd need to make changes on your router to block this,
depending on how your VPN is configured.
Recursive DNS would make your Pi‑hole the only authoritative DNS for
your network and devices. You'd need to lock down your network so only
the Pi‑hole can reach out to the internet for DNS queries and cache
that on behalf of your devices.
Another fun thing to do is adding a VPN to your Pi‑hole.
This encrypts your traffic and masks your DNS lookups from your ISP. There
are different ways to do this, ranging from only DNS over VPN to full
tunnel VPN. Check out the docs for the various options. Digging even deeper
and requiring more effort, you can use the Pi‑hole to connect to Tor nodes
to achieve better anonymity.
This can look suspicious to your ISP, so check out the guide if you want to
try that out. Remember, true anonymity is very difficult.
You can also have a local web server on your Pi‑hole with open
source options, such as NGINX and Caddy.
Finally, if you want to send your logs to a logging server or SIEM,
you totally can.
This can be used for correlation and alerting and longer storage.
I've included one such example to send your Pi‑hole logs to Splunk.
This is an example dashboard you can get with Splunk.