I just recently started playing around with an old pc as my homeserver and am curious of any recommendations for lesser known self hostable foss software that you would recommend

  • Have you looked at Adguard Home instead of pi-hole? I had been on pi-hole for years and just recently switched to AGH. My primary is in docker and secondary on pi but I think I like your idea better so I’ll probably switch that around. I like AGH better so far.

    • I haven’t looked into it yet. What do you like better about it?

      (I put my primary pi-hole on a pi because it’s practically the only thing on it - I can reboot it quickly if needed and not have a lengthy downtime on my DNS - the was before I had the second one running)

      • I find the user interface to be more intuitive and it seems like it’s a bit more effective than pi-hole at ad blocking. It also has built in adult content filter lists if you want that which includes forcing safe search on multiple search engines, which is interesting. One thing I’ll miss about pi-hole is the local dns config. I had stuff set like “pi.local” and “unRAID.local” so I didn’t have to type IPs over and over. Afaik, AGH does not have that feature.

          • Jumping back on to correct myself: AGH does have local DNS ability. It’s under ‘DNS rewrites’ and behaves like a host file. Works perfectly!

            Edit: well sort of. Doesn’t want to accept IP:port format. Damn. I’ll have to keep looking…

            • Thanks! I’m running caddy server on a raspberry pi (same machine as pi-hole). I use it for the reverse proxy mostly. It maps the domain to the specific machine. My pi-hole maps all the domains to the IP of the caddy server. Probably there’s a more efficient way to do this but I haven’t tried yet.