Pi-hole should have been installed second. Unfortunately, it was near number 10 or so. Servers started arriving and I wanted to get them on the network. I also had not picked out a naming convention for the servers (ultimately decided to use Marvel characters) so setting up static IP addresses in DNS was mostly off the table. Anyway..
I decided to run Pi-Hole in a VM on Proxmox. Migrated DNS and DHCP off of pfSense. Little drama although understanding unBound took a bit. Seems to be working like a charm. The info provided by the ad-blocking functionally has proven to be interesting. Need to tune it a bit as the number of emails that load content from the web, which looks like an ad to Pi-hole, is high. Funnist side effect thus far has been from the school volunteer/sign-up website. They expressly asked that the ad-blocker be turned off because ads are their main source of income. Makes sense but it is an indicator that society has not found a repeatable approach to fund useful(necessary) software/services that happen to below margin. But I digress…
Insights provided by the data captured are interesting. Not sure what I am going to do with them yet. As an example the number of times devices call somewhere (I assume home) on a daily basis is higher than even I expected. On a related note, I can kinda get my head around software that wants an internet connection (mainly for setup and updates) but I cannot understand software that requires a connection and a public IP (Looking at you Nextcloud) to function. While I am not trying to hide my network, all the addresses are private and I run my own, internal, DNS. Plan on setting up an internal CA. DO NOT plan on jumping through hoops for software that I have no intention of using when not physically on my network. Not a Pi-hole issue, more of a mine set really in certain parts of the community. Guess I digressed again.