Self-hosting your own DNS service can be both highly impactful and quite challenging. In my experience, AdGuard Home emerged as the optimal solution for this purpose.
AdGuard Home offers secure DNS filtering, customizable configurations, and access to various DNS blacklists to help reduce internet clutter and enhance privacy.
DNS plays a critical role in networking, enabling communication between devices and guiding how traffic is routed and directed across the internet. Given the importance of reliable DNS resolution, I prioritized implementing redundancy to ensure continuous availability.
To achieve this, I set up two instances of AdGuard Home – one functioning as the primary DNS server and the other as a failover or load balancer. This setup provides resilience against server outages.
Additionally, I desired local DNS resolution for internal network entries. Although configuring this was somewhat complex, after some experimentation, I discovered an effective solution.
Since I utilize pfSense as my firewall/router, I configured the upstream DNS providers within its interface to use Cloudflare. For each network interface, I set the DHCP DNS servers to point to my AdGuard Home servers. Furthermore, I configured pfSense as the upstream DNS provider for both AdGuard instances.
This configuration ensures that client devices continue to benefit from AdGuard’s filtering capabilities, while all DNS queries are routed through pfSense for added control and redundancy.
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