Redundant Synchronized Pi-Hole with keepalived and gravity-sync

📅 March 4, 2024
“Help! When Pi-Hole goes down, nobody can access the Internet!”

Pi-Hole is a superb network-wide ad blocker because it blocks connections to forbidden domain names listed in its blocklists when resolving DNS requests, but if Pi-Hole hangs up or is inadvertently turned off for whatever reason, then domain names cannot be resolved and it seems like the Internet is down.

To help protect against this and provide some form of resiliency, we can mirror two Pi-Hole instances so if one goes down, the backup will take over, and users can still access the Internet.

This is simpler than it sounds thanks to a service called keepalived. Let’s see how to set up two Pi-Hole instances using a virtual IP address (VIP) to provide high availability (HA).

Open and Move a Web Browser Window from a Script

📅 January 28, 2024
“Is it possible to open a web browser from a script and then manipulate it using wmctrl?”

Yes, but this is not as straightforward as it seems.

Let’s open a GUI web browser from a script so we can view the real-time pihole log queries and move that window to any workspace or location on the desktop.

What? You already have it figured out?

Well, well, Little Grasshopper, unless you have attempted to code this behavior for yourself, you might be in for a surprise.

I thought this would be simple too, but it turns out that I was mistaken. The browser would not relocate despite coding everything correctly. Here is how to fix that using a few tricks.

Monitor Pi-Hole Remotely with PADD in a Terminal

📅 January 22, 2024
Curious to see what Pi-Hole is doing?

Sure, we can use the FTL web-based GUI in a browser, but perhaps you are limited to a terminal interface or maybe you are Mr. Ubergeek who desires a terminal that autoloads in a terminal on your desktop at system startup. Or maybe you just want options.

This is completely possible!

Let’s create a script that displays two terminals at preset locations on the desktop where one terminal shows Pi-Hole statistics using PADD and the other shows the Pi-Hole host system information using bpytop.