Hi guys! So…I have a self-hosted DNS server. Initially I’d use pihole, with unbound, and the more or less basic blocklists. But from time to time things would start acting wonky. Sometimes a reboot would fix it. Sometimes…not really and I was really not sure what was going wrong, but it was clearly DNS. Changing the clients settings from my own server to something like 9.9.9.9 would immediately get it sorted out.

So I went with an adguard server. In the last few days I’ve started to notice weird behaviors. Today I’ve lost the Azure desktop I was connected, and it was very clearly looking like DNS. So I checked…and yup, 9.9.9.9 again would sort it all out. So…I’m not sure what’s going wrong. I’m selfhosting these on an LXC container in proxmox. Nothing else seems to have issues connecting, and I see almost no resources being used. Any ideas? Any other DNS server I might be able to try?

Thanks!

  • InnerScientist@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Pi-hole forwards the requests to another DNS server. Unbound can ask the root servers and go down the DNS chain.

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Guess I’m not following, both still have to request from other (upstream) DNS servers, so what does unbound add?

      Thanks!

      • InnerScientist@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        Forwarding: just passes the DNS query to another DNS server (e.g. your ISP’s). Home routers use forwarding to pass DNS queries from your home network’s clients to your ISP’s DNS servers. For example, for foo.example.com, a forwarding DNS server would first check its cache (did it already ask this question before), and if the answer is not in its cache, it would ask its forwarder (your ISP’s DNS server) for the answer, which would respond with either a cached response, or would perform recursion until it figured out the answer.

        Recursion: the DNS server receiving the query takes it upon itself to figure out the answer to that query by recursively querying authoritative DNS servers for that domain. For example, for foo.example.com, a recursor would first query the root servers for what DNS servers are responsible for the .com TLD, then it would ask those servers for example.com, then it would query the servers for example.com for foo.example.com, finally getting the answer to the original query.

        Copy-pate from here.

        Basically, it remove one middle man from the DNS resolving.