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Setting Pi-hole up on a Raspberry Pi Zero W v1.1

Use the Raspberry Pi Imager to install a copy of Raspberry Lite (32-bit) to a 16GB or larger SD card. Make sure to setup SSH access as well as a user & password so that you can access the Zero without a keyboard and mouse.

Put the SD card into the Pi and connect your power and monitor.

You’ll need to login to your router to see what IP has been assigned to the Zero. Once you can login use Putty or something similar to connect via SSH. Once logged in run the following command to install Pi-hole

sudo curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

Make sure to setup Pi-Hole for web-access so that you can manage it from your browser.

Unbound – Recursive DNS

https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/

sudo apt install unbound


For recursively querying a host that is not cached as an address, the resolver needs to start at the top of the server tree and query the root servers, to know where to go for the top level domain for the address being queried. Unbound comes with default builtin hints. Remember to update this file every 6 months.

wget -O root.hints https://www.internic.net/domain/named.root
sudo mv root.hints /var/lib/unbound/

or

wget https://www.internic.net/domain/named.root -qO- | sudo tee /var/lib/unbound/root.hints


Configure unbound


Edit the unbound config file

sudo nano /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/pi-hole.conf

And add the following by copying and right-clicking in the nano window, then ctrl+x, y and enter

# The  verbosity  number, level 0 means no verbosity, only errors.
# Level 1 gives operational information. Level  2  gives  detailed
# operational  information. Level 3 gives query level information,
# output per query.  Level 4 gives  algorithm  level  information.
# Level 5 logs client identification for cache misses.  Default is
# level 1.
verbosity: 0

interface: 127.0.0.1
port: 5335
do-ip4: yes
do-udp: yes
do-tcp: yes

# May be set to yes if you have IPv6 connectivity
do-ip6: no

# You want to leave this to no unless you have *native* IPv6. With 6to4 and
# Terredo tunnels your web browser should favor IPv4 for the same reasons
prefer-ip6: no

# Use this only when you downloaded the list of primary root servers!
# Read  the  root  hints from this file. Make sure to 
# update root.hints evry 5-6 months.
root-hints: "/var/lib/unbound/root.hints"

# Trust glue only if it is within the servers authority
harden-glue: yes

# Ignore very large queries.
harden-large-queries: yes

# Require DNSSEC data for trust-anchored zones, if such data is absent, the zone becomes BOGUS
# If you want to disable DNSSEC, set harden-dnssec stripped: no
harden-dnssec-stripped: yes

# Number of bytes size to advertise as the EDNS reassembly buffer
# size. This is the value put into  datagrams over UDP towards
# peers. The actual buffer size is determined by msg-buffer-size
# (both for TCP and UDP).
edns-buffer-size: 1232

# Rotates RRSet order in response (the pseudo-random 
# number is taken from Ensure privacy of local IP 
# ranges the query ID, for speed and thread safety).  
# private-address: 192.168.0.0/16
rrset-roundrobin: yes

# Time to live minimum for RRsets and messages in the cache. If the minimum
# kicks in, the data is cached for longer than the domain owner intended,
# and thus less queries are made to look up the data. Zero makes sure the
# data in the cache is as the domain owner intended, higher values,
# especially more than an hour or so, can lead to trouble as the data in
# the cache does not match up with the actual data anymore
cache-min-ttl: 300
cache-max-ttl: 86400

# Have unbound attempt to serve old responses from cache with a TTL of 0 in
# the response without waiting for the actual resolution to finish. The
# actual resolution answer ends up in the cache later on. 
serve-expired: yes

# Harden against algorithm downgrade when multiple algorithms are
# advertised in the DS record.
harden-algo-downgrade: yes

# Ignore very small EDNS buffer sizes from queries.
harden-short-bufsize: yes

# Refuse id.server and hostname.bind queries
hide-identity: yes

# Report this identity rather than the hostname of the server.
identity: "Server"

# Refuse version.server and version.bind queries
hide-version: yes

# Prevent the unbound server from forking into the background as a daemon
do-daemonize: no

# Number  of  bytes size of the aggressive negative cache.
neg-cache-size: 4m

# Send minimum amount of information to upstream servers to enhance privacy
qname-minimisation: yes

# Deny queries of type ANY with an empty response.
# Works only on version 1.8 and above
deny-any: yes

# Do no insert authority/additional sections into response messages when
# those sections are not required. This reduces response size
# significantly, and may avoid TCP fallback for some responses. This may
# cause a slight speedup
minimal-responses: yes

# Perform prefetching of close to expired message cache entries
# This only applies to domains that have been frequently queried
# This flag updates the cached domains
prefetch: yes

# Fetch the DNSKEYs earlier in the validation process, when a DS record is
# encountered. This lowers the latency of requests at the expense of little
# more CPU usage.
prefetch-key: yes

# One thread should be sufficient, can be increased on beefy machines. In reality for 
# most users running on small networks or on a single machine, it should be unnecessary
# to seek performance enhancement by increasing num-threads above 1.
num-threads: 1

# more cache memory. rrset-cache-size should twice what msg-cache-size is.
msg-cache-size: 50m
rrset-cache-size: 100m

# Faster UDP with multithreading (only on Linux).
so-reuseport: yes

# Ensure kernel buffer is large enough to not lose messages in traffix spikes
so-rcvbuf: 4m
so-sndbuf: 4m

# Set the total number of unwanted replies to keep track of in every thread.
# When it reaches the threshold, a defensive action of clearing the rrset
# and message caches is taken, hopefully flushing away any poison.
# Unbound suggests a value of 10 million.
unwanted-reply-threshold: 100000

# Minimize logs
# Do not print one line per query to the log
log-queries: no
# Do not print one line per reply to the log
log-replies: no
# Do not print log lines that say why queries return SERVFAIL to clients
log-servfail: no
# Do not print log lines to inform about local zone actions
log-local-actions: no
# Do not print log lines that say why queries return SERVFAIL to clients
logfile: /dev/null

# Ensure privacy of local IP ranges
private-address: 192.168.0.0/16
private-address: 169.254.0.0/16
private-address: 172.16.0.0/12
private-address: 10.0.0.0/8
private-address: fd00::/8
private-address: fe80::/10

Check unbound config file for errors

unbound-checkconf /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/pi-hole.conf

it should return no errors in /etc/unbound/unbound.conf.d/pi-hole.conf

Start unbound service and check whether the domain is resolving. The first query will be slow but the subsequent queries will resolve in under 1ms.

sudo service unbound start
dig github.com @127.0.0.1 -p 5335

Test validation

You can test DNSSEC validation using

dig fail01.dnssec.works @127.0.0.1 -p 5335
dig dnssec.works @127.0.0.1 -p 5335


The first command should give a status report of SERVFAIL and no IP address. The second should give NOERROR plus an IP address.

Configure Pi-hole

Pi-hole DNS Setup
Pi-hole DNS Setup

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