Advice Home Assistant + PiHole

Hi there,

Currently i’m running 2 Pi’s (3B+)
One is running home assistant and the other is running PiHole.

I’m thinking about upgrading to a Pi4 with 4GB Ram.
I’m also looking for some advise and/or other people running them both on 1 Pi

So is this possible to run both Hass and PiHole on a Raspberry Pi 4 without overloading it?.

I run them separately however, from everything I’ve read, pihole doesn’t use many resources (some people run it on a Pi Zero). Therefore you should be able to run both Home Assistant and Pihole on an 4Mb RPi 4 without any performance problems.

You can run both on a Pi3b+ together without any problems. No need for a Pi4. :slight_smile: Pihole is using litterally nothing on system resources.

On what you’re running your Pihole depends mostly on your setup.
This is my “pihole” history:

  • first try was Pihole on a Pi2 <= works great / HA on a Pi3b+
  • I upgraded to a Pi4 for HA, so I tried it on the same machine <= works equally great, no differences
  • I moved back to a seperate Pi2 for Pihole, but that’s only because I need the Pihole in another subnet. I’m splitting up my network into IoT, private and a DMZ, so the Pihole needs to get into DMZ where HA needs to be in IoT.

My Pi2 with Pihole is using around 50% RAM and mostly under 10% CPU load. Have you ever thought about running your Pihole on your router? :wink:

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Alright Alright.

But the trigger for me was the option to run the whole bunch on SSD. I have some bad experience with corrupted SD cards after a power outage. The whole thing messed up :wink:

:slight_smile: I’m with you, but… :slight_smile: Pihole isn’t using the sd card a lot, unlike HA. I do use an SSD for me Pi4 with HA, but the pihole is good to go with an sd card and “normal” backups. Most of the data is stored in RAM, not on sd card. :slight_smile:

Hoe did you get the SSD to boot in the first place?. What guide did you follow?. Attached an M2.Sata SSD but cant figure out how to run from it.

@MDLefevere Pi4 or Pi3? With the Pi4 there is at the moment only the “dual” option: you have to have inserted a sd-card, so the boot partition stays on the sd, but everything else is going to the SSD. That works very well until the RPi foundation comes up with a solution to boot directly from SSD. What I’ve read, I wouldn’t expect that to happen soon…
I’m just working on a small write-up about the installation on a Pi4, because the tutorial I used isn’t totally clear and didn’t work as such for me, but here it is anyway: Rpi 4 installation - Installation - Home Assistant Community

With the Pi3 there is an option to set, afterwards the Pi3 is really booting from SSD.

With a Pi4.
But this is a bit to complicated for me. I think ill wait for the RPi foundation and their solution :wink:

It looks more complicated, than it is. :slight_smile: Maybe you can work with my write-up (if I ever get it finished), I’ll try to be as-easy as I can be… :wink: :slight_smile:

As you have everything at hand, you can really do this. The foundation has given a work order for their boot problems on the Pi4: first is the network boot, if this is rolled out, the development for usb boot (that’s the official term for our SSD plans) will get started… Sounds to me like this will never happen, despite the community asking for it (still friendly, but getting heated) :smiley:

I followed the guide and got it working.
The only issue i find is PiHole itself.

Ive setup Hassio with IP: 192.168.1.4 and want PiHole running on it on 192.168.1.3 and be pingable. As that possible?.

I can give it 1.3 but its not pingable from within the network, and i only get quiries when i let PiHole listen to all interfaces and then everything is from my router and not seperate devices.

Super new to HA, so I’m still playing around with the VM while I wait for the hardware I ordered to arrive. I do have a PI4 that’s running pihole and OpenVPN, and I was going to try and see how well it does if I add HA to it. At the moment, yeah, it barely uses anything so I wanted to get more out of the pi. Does it matter which HA install method to use? What has everyone been using?

I’m guessing I could start with a clean HA OS install and add pihole to it? Or maybe I could just install docker on my current system and run the HA container from there? I’ll see, but I do want to try out the docker method since I’ve never really had a need to try it out yet - now’s a perfect time, but, if there are cons to any of the methods, I’d appreciate getting a rundown.

Thanks!

see