Hy everyone, I have a PiHole instance running on my home server, and I changed my router (Fritz box) DNS in order to use my PiHole. Everything runs great.
I was wondering if I can put another DNS provider on my “alternative DNS server” in my router, in order to have a fallback alternative in case my server is down, or if I should avoid it.
I’m asking this because I don’t know if the request will be handled in parallel between the two DNS provider (that would make my PiHole useless) or not. Thank you.
There’s no RFC that specifies that a specific order is applied to DNS servers.
RFC 2182 details the operation and functionality of secondary DNS servers. Which defines/influences how resolvers behave with multiple DNS servers.
That RFC is about DNS servers in the context of DNS zones in domain names. Not for a DNS client running DNS queries like an operating system. And the RFC is very clear about this:
For your Windows, Linux whatever machine “there are simply multiple DNS servers”.
It doesn’t. As I said in another comment “most operating systems will just load balance or opportunistically pick between the two”, and there’s the relevant part from the RFC:
When it comes to a “secondary”DNS… there is nothing like a primary and secondary DNS server. These indications are quite misleading but many systems adopted it this way. Pihole only list the DNS servers as primary and secondary, because this is what the providers write on their pages. The bad phrasing is supported especially by how Windows handles it.
Most operating systems implement DNS servers as alternatives, not as fallbacks, i.e. they will query any of both servers from time to time, so it is quite likely that you will loose your Pi-hole filtering capabilities (at least partially) [if you specify a secondary DNS server on your network].
The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).