Using Pi-hole with Unbound

This page documents the steps to use Pi-hole with unbound as an All-Around DNS Solution along with ad-blocker functionality by using a publicly available blacklist.

Prerequisites

A dnsmasq (or another DHCP server/router) on the network, as DHCP function of Pi-hole is not used here.

Installation

Currently the pihole is available in the testing repository. It can be safely installed by following the guidelines for enabling the testing repo and for installing such packages with the use of the @testing tag.

The command below installs necessary packages:

$ doas apk add pihole@testing unbound

Configuration

Add your local user to the 'pihole' group as follows:

$ doas addgroup $USER pihole

Note: This section uses 192.168.1.3 as IP address of Pi-hole server, while the Internet gateway router/DHCP server is at 192.168.1.1

Unbound configuration

Create a file /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/pi-hole.conf based on the content given in unbound page of Pi-hole website.

Download root hints for the Unbound server.

Ensure that the /etc/unbound/unbound.conf file has only the following line uncommented:

Contents of /etc/unbound/unbound.conf

# All lines are to be commented out like this, except the below ...
include-toplevel: "/etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/*.conf"

Once the above changes are made, check the unbound config and restart the unbound service.

Service management

Add the pihole service to auto-start using OpenRC:

$ doas rc-update add pihole default

pihole service can be managed using standard start|stop|restart OpenRC commands. To start the service immediately:

$ doas rc-service pihole start

Using web interface to configure Pi-hole

The Pi-hole web interface can be used only if the pihole service is started as per instructions in the service management section. Once the pihole service is started, connect to Pi-hole web interface for further configuration: https://192.168.1.3/admin/

Enable recursive DNS

Add unbound to the Custom DNS servers section on the admin page: https://192.168.1.3/admin/settings/dns as follows:127.0.0.1#5335

Remember to Save&Apply to make the changes to Pi-hole permanent. From now onwards, you can start using Pi-hole ip address:192.168.1.3 as DNS server for your clients. From clients using 192.168.1.3 as DNS, Pi-hole admin page can be reached at http://pi.hole/admin/

Add blocklist file

On the Subscribed lists group management page at http://pi.hole/admin/groups/lists, add steven black list by adding an entry http://sbc.io/hosts/hosts and Click Add blocklist button.

To load the blocklist, Update Gravity (list of blocked domains) by clicking Update on the page http://pi.hole/admin/gravity or running the command:

$ pihole -g

Ensure that your clients point their DNS to Pi-hole ip address:192.168.1.3 to enjoy Ad-Free browsing!