A separate home for DNS

Hardware

A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with cooling and a case. The published inventory lists 4 GB LPDDR4, an ARM Cortex-A72, microSD and a 500 GB SSD. (The original July article mentions a 64 GB SD card; the current inventory is the one to trust.)

The design

Pi-hole moved from a Proxmox LXC onto the Pi. Unbound runs beside it as a recursive resolver, so DNS answers don’t depend on a third-party resolver. The rest of the Pi’s job is lightweight: monitoring, dashboards and small utilities.

Decisions

• Separate always-on utilities from the main compute host.
• Use the Pi for light work. It isn’t a second Proxmox server and isn’t meant to be.

What it does and doesn’t buy

Maintenance on the main host now has a smaller area of impact. That isn’t redundancy, and it isn’t a backup. The write-ups don’t document a failure or recovery test for the Pi, so I won’t claim one.

Lessons

Where a service runs can matter as much as how it runs. Independent hardware gives maintenance a smaller blast radius.

See how a DNS lookup is answered →