Yeah. Nowadays I use pi-hole which is dnsmasq underneath and use it with unbound.
Works great. Minimal fuss, efficient setup, little maintenance, I don't have to understand the guts. Everything on my local network is addressable.
Ad blocking at the router is also something you don't want live without once you've gone there but pi-hole is a great solution even if you don't want that.
I use Pihole as well (even tried to synchronize two for HA but I gave up). It is fantastic.
What worries me with dnsmasq is that it is a personal project maintained on a personal git (by a great person!). Sure, one can fork and whatnot but without several people participating it can fade out pretty quickly.
Yeah, fair point. And I don't think I've seen a router for sale that wasn't using dnsmasq as a dhcp server for 20 odd years. Must be some, I guess, but haven't encountered them.
I don't know about unbound's blocklists and stats or indeed much about unbound at all.
This: https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/ was stupidly simple, pi-hole has a gui that I was already used to and it all works great. So I think about and study other things that need fixing/improving in my life instead.
To flip it, why would I use unbound without pi-hole? What's the win I haven't seen (or even looked at or considered?)
> To flip it, why would I use unbound without pi-hole? What's the win I haven't seen (or even looked at or considered?)
In my experience, the fewer moving parts the better.
I run Unbound on my OPNsense router, and it uses the same blocklists as Pi-hole and the stats page (blocked domains, DNS requests, etc) are the same afaict.
But you still need something to do your dhcp, so maybe not fewer moving parts? Dunno.
I did pi-hole first, then much later decided to use unbound for dns because it looked super easy to add it. It was. Haven't thought about it much since. I hope your experience was as good or better.
Works great. Minimal fuss, efficient setup, little maintenance, I don't have to understand the guts. Everything on my local network is addressable.
Ad blocking at the router is also something you don't want live without once you've gone there but pi-hole is a great solution even if you don't want that.