How to setup up a Pihole docker container for network wide adblocking

This video is a tutorial showing how to setup a pi-hole docker container on unRAID. Pi-hole is a great network wide adblocker.

A big thanks to
Lime technology team for their constant work on unRAID

Music credits

[gonehaywire]

Something missed in the video is if you use a different interface then br0 for example you put a 10G card in a server with 1G port. You also need to set Key7 or INTERFACE to the same brX value or this will not work. Took awhile to figure that out so hopefully if in same boat this comment will save some time.

[tuttel]

I just used this older video and it is still valid. You absolutely need to change the Unraid server's DNS to manual and point at Google DNS servers or something. I was using a DHCP reserved IP to always give my Unraid server the same IP. That uses the router as the DNS Server. For me at least this caused Pihole to not work when manually setting a computer to use Pihole as the DNS Server.

[Juicetyn]

Thanks for the guide, still all relevant in 2024 :). Only difference was that the docker seems to automatically set the IP address the same as what you set it in the first section, so you don't need to do it twice (in that key section)

[AronsTube]

Excellent video! Just built my first unRAID Server last night and I am having a blast learning all sorts of new things.

[JohnLomaga]

Should point out 1 very important change that should be made to Unraid's DNS settings. I set my Pi-Hole IP at the router level so all devices on the network go through Pi-Hole. This includes the Unraid server. I started noticing some speed issues of the webgui, and then started getting bad speed tests from the Speedtest plugin. But access to my shares was not impacted. Did some digging and found out Unraid is unable to connect to an IP within itself, so it was trying to hit the Pi-Hole as it's DNS and timing out then finally failing over to 1.1.1.1


Everyone should manually set the Unraid DNS setting within Network settings and NOT use PI-Hole as the DNS.

[blindside]

Nice video.! Thank you so much for putting in hard work into making really informative and making my experience with unRAID just that much better.

[Techielife]

Would love to see Pi-Hole with Unbound install tutorial. Great job Ed

[chsknight]

I was just looking for a unraid pihole video the other day. Then here comes space invader with some knowledge.

[Fullarton]

Great video! Now that Google will be disabling Ad Blocker addons in Chrome this is a must have on any network

[carlostrudo]

I was only able to install pihole in my unraid because of this video. Tks so much !

[BrondRando]

This is great! I Set up this docker and it works great! I loved it so much I used the Raspberry Pi B+ I had laying around as a second Pihole. Now my router points to both. This way I am always set regardless of which path is used. If one goes down I am still protected as well. Thanks again for the fantastic videos!

[TmulXT]

I've had trouble with this one in the past, love to free up my RPi. Thanks.

[magicmanj]

awesome video as usual, added the blocklist as mentioned upto 1.5M domains, thanks again

[xstrongx]

Is it possible you could do an updated video for this, including settings for us Unraider's with vpn's, and our newly setup pfsense routers?

[colinandkerry]

Excellent as per usual, was just about to buy a rasberry pi to do this but will give this a try 1st. Thanks again

[-rhys]

Great info, thanks for posting that. I had to steal the CPU on my unRAID server for my main machine, but I'll definitely be taking advantage of this once it is back on its feet.

[petera.morrison]

Where can I buy you a beer? I was hunting and pecking for an hour with settings. Then, I asked myself "Self, did S-I-O do a video on this?" Duh... of course he did. And now, it works like a pro.

[blade_]

As always, wonderful video mate! ... before UnRAID 6.4 features were available, you had to change your UnRAID webUI port, so I ended up just creating a simple ubuntu VM and running PiHole on that .... might switch to the docker version and see how it stacks up :)

[rottison]

Fantastic video This is a great tool to use.  your videos have made a huge difference in the way I use UnRaid

[digiblur]

One thing to watch out for is if your unRaid box is setup using a static DHCP address assigned by your router, go into unRaid network settings and hard code in some DNS servers other than the PiHole IP as unRaid won't be able to hit DNS on the PiHole container.