Has the issue with dnsmasq v<2.78 been resolved?

[mdfrg]

This Year's Febuary I upgraded pihole to version v3.3 ant FTL to v3.0 and came across the issue described later in pihole's blog: Pi-hole v3.3 Released: It’s “Extra” Special – Pi-hole

I have pihole installed on Debian 8 Jessie (yes, Debian, it's on VPS not on Raspberry Pi). Because the version of dnsmasq provided is 2.72 and doesn't support log-queries=extra option I had to downgrade to version 3.2.1 and FTL 2.13.

Fast forward couple of months and I'm visiting pihole's blog and github's issues again. I see no mention about this issue being resolved, however I see the announcement of FTLDNS being developed: FTLDNS: Pi-hole’s Own DNS/DHCP server – Pi-hole

My questions are:

1. Can I safely upgrade my pi on debian 8? Has the issue with dnsmasq been resolved?
2. If not, is the FTLDNS an option and how can I enable it? Do I have to git checkout to FTLDNS branch (https://github.com/pi-hole/FTL/tree/FTLDNS) and if so, which combination of versions of pihole, web and FTL should I choose?

[Mcat12]

See this post for some workarounds for v3.3:

Why can't I run Pi-hole v3.3+ on Raspbian Jessie or with dnsmasq < v2.72?

Update: 2018-08-06 As of v4.0, Pi-hole ships with _FTL_DNS, our fork of dnsmasq, which should restore compatibility with Raspbian Jessie. We still recommend installing a newer OS as Jessie is EOL anyway. By default, Raspbian Jessie only supports dnsmasq v2.72, which does not work with the log-queries=extra flag, which is required for Pi-hole v3.3+. You may see error messages such as: dnsmasq: extraneous parameter at line 37 of /etc/dnsmasq.d/01-pihole.conf failed! There are two option…

You could also update to the FTLDNS beta.

[mdfrg]

Yeah, I'm aware of those options, they're described in the blogpost as well.

@Mcat12

You could also update to the FTLDNS beta.

How to do that? By git checkout or pihole -up?

[Mcat12]

https://pi-hole.net/2018/03/24/help-us-beta-test-ftldns/

[mdfrg]

So, to sum it up, there is no easy way to update. Either upgrade to stretch, manually pimp dnsmasq version or betatest FTLDNS branch. Thank you, will wait &see for the moment since all works fine with 3.2.1

[Mcat12]

The last two options you said are both very easy; we even provide copy-paste instructions to perform them. The easiest is updating dnsmasq.

[mdfrg]

It's not about complexity, it's about potential bugs. I run pihole on my production server and I don't want to risk it to crash because of some potential dependency errors.