I have an asus router with a pi-hole on the network.
I was doing some work on my server and noticed that when pi-hole was down, I couldn’t access the internet. I was looking for some ideas online how to deal with this, but they said to have a second pihole on the network in case one is offline. Is that the only way to do it? Is there any way to have the network go back to normal if the pihole is offline?
I don’t think this accomplishes what he wants. The router DHCP will assign the second DNS address as you mention, but the devices will select one at random, not as a backup/failover. So what happens is that devices sometimes go through the Pi-hole and sometimes go through the secondary DNS address and receive ads. The only real way I’m aware of is to have a second pi-hole for redundancy. Personally, I decided to use a cloud based service (NextDNS) for this exact reason. I didn’t want my families internet to rely on devices that I host.
How many queries a month do you have? I’m at 15 days and I’m already at 750K. Do you pay for your service? I can do that, just curious what is common.
I’m not exactly sure how many queries, but it’s above the free limit. I purchased the pro plan. For $20 a year and it’s been a great service for me. I can send a referral code for 30% off (I think). I think adguard has a similar service.