Hi, I want to run a pi-hole on my network, but I run a Helium miner and don't want to affect the traffic speed to and from that device. Even a couple of milliseconds of delay can affect the mining rewards.
I know one solution would be to run the miner on my primary router, and then have a second wifi router running off that with the pi-hole running on it which would be used for all regular internet use... but that seems a bit convoluted.
My pi-hole would be running on a very basic Raspberry Pi B.
What would be the best way to reduce latency without running a second router? Is there a way to entirely have the miner outside the pi-hole?
I'm in the UK and my primary router is a BT Smart Hub 2
The easist solution is is to manually set a DNS Server in the miners network configuration so that it doesn't use pihole at all.
Unfortunately there are no network settings on the miner, it's all automatic.
This can also usually be done in the router by using MAC Address reservation. Some allow you to specify a DNS Server for that binding.
Honestly, as long as the pihole is set to an upstream server that has decent latency you should not have an issue and resolution should be quite fast. I would just avoid unbound as the intial query will nomally take longer though cached queries are very fast.
Thank you for that. It's useful to know that unbound may not be ideal for me.
What is the best way to test the DNS latency? I think the miner just communicates with one AWS address.
Should I test the ping time to that address after manually switching to various DNS providers, or is there a way to test them in bulk?
A site like https://www.dnsperf.com/ or https://dnschecker.org/ can provide bulk results. You could use this to narrow down your list of providers and then test them from the pihole using the dig command ( dig @1.1.1.1 <domain>) and check the query time near the bottom.
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Thank you, that is all very helpful.
You mentioned cached queries on unbound. If I do use unbound and the address is cached, am I right in thinking that this might be the fastest option of them all?
As I said the miner only communicates with one AWS address and I don't think this will change.
Either way you will get caching. The benefit of unbound is that it provides an authoritive answer for the domain by querying root sever, tld sever etc ( recursive dns lookups ) so you know the ip that it provides is the actual ip. Because the intial query has to go through these extra steps it takes longer but cached results going to be very fast as they come from pihole.
When you use something like cloudflare as your upstream dns server, it acts as a middle man but the result is still cached by pihole so its still going to be very fast.
So unbound gives you and authoritive answer and the cost of a slightly longer intial query time while a 3rd party resolver like cloudflare gives you faster inital resolve but you place your trust in them to provide the correct ip and to not misuse your data.
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