Pi-hole and game servers

Help
1

There are quiet a bunch of online games being played on our network. Everything from generic Facebook and other Flash games, to big MMORPGS, shooters and other competitive video games where having lag is an issue. I have been rolling out Pi-hole slowly over the network, so far only on more workstation systems and smart phones and it's working great to filter out a ton of stuff. But I am afraid rolling it out onto the systems that are used for gaming that things going to lag, have login issues and in case with the Facebook games stop working at all.

Am I being to careful and no bad things will happen?

3

Ahum, Pi-hole only proxies DNS traffic.
All other network traffic that a game would require uses the regular routes, via you router if need to go to the Internet.
You would not notice any performance issues in game.
Or maybe if the game does a lot, and I mean really allot of DNS queries which usually gets cached for some time.

4

Ok thank you.
I was thinking this because I saw guides how to setup an Xbox One or PS4 onto Pihole and thought maybe it wouldn't matter that much for real games. But I don't know how browser based Flash games work, aren't they doing dns requests to get their data in?

5

Yes.
But most all browser clients cache the DNS answers for a period of time (TTL=Time To Live).
So the answers for consecutive queries get pulled from local stored cache on the device instead of querying DNS (Pi-hole) again.
This TTL in seconds can be seen when doing a dig for a domain:

pi@noads:~ $ dig pi-hole.net
[..]
;; ANSWER SECTION:
pi-hole.net.            3600    IN      A       206.189.252.21
[..]

In above example the TTL is 3600 seconds and counting down.

Ps. Pi-hole also caches these queries so if another device queries the same domain, Pi-hole will pull the data from its own cache instead of querying DNS servers upstream on the Internet.

2

@purpleballoon Welcome to the Pi-hole Community!
I'm gleaming from your post that you do NOT want Pi-hole to interfere with network clients that are used for gaming ... correct?

If so, you basically have two choices:

  1. Enable the Pi-hole DNS proxy on your network's main Internet router, but individually change the DNS settings on each of the gaming machines that you don't want using Pi-hole.

  2. Wait for Pi-hole v5 to be released where you can control which network client that can access the Pi-hole.

6

This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.