Home Assistant, Pi-Hole and VPN on one Pi, good idea or not?

A few months ago I added Pi-Hole to my old raspberry pi, (Raspberry Pi Model B) just to try it out and it was very effective. However as I had a newer Pi which seemed to have plenty of capacity (Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Quad Core CPU 1.2 GHz 1 GB RAM Motherboard) I thought what the heck, let’s streamline this and add Pi-Hole to HA. Again, no problem all went well. Last week I thought, what the heck, let’s throw a VPN in there too. It seemed to work but then overnight the perfect storm of updates hit; a new iOS app, some updates to security on the network at work and I also got a new external IP address. Everything still worked, but differently at home to work. I removed the IP address for pi-hole from my router and stopped using the VPN and of course now HA and the iOS app are back to working perfectly fine, the same at work and home.

My question is, do people think running HA, Pi-Hole AND a VPN is a sane proposition on one Pi? Here’s my basic setup;

  • HA on Hassbian (I prefer to tinker, Hass.io isn’t my bag)
  • iOS HA App for device tracking (I trigger automations when I arrive/leave work)
  • restricted ports from the wifi at work (I don’t have a list, and don’t want to poke around)
  • BT unlimited fibre (so good connection at home, but no fixed IP available)
  • Archer D7 router (I have the BT Smart Hub as well just didn’t bother plugging it in)
  • script running to update my domain’s A record with an IP so I have a permanent address to login externally

just my 2 cents worth…

I have multiple pis, one of which runs a broadcastify server, pihole, and pivpn. The other runs HA and pihole. Nothing really seems to tax either one. I had some issues with some components of HA that would peg my system to 100% but that’s been fixed. Pihole isn’t going to take much. Depending on how many devices you have HA really shouldn’t take much either. If you’re only using 1 device on the VPN it shouldn’t take much.

You could probably get away with it just fine. I would recommend that you install it on a flash drive or a USB HDD/SSD and use something other than Hassbian. I’m using the latest Debian on all mine.

For now I just used the old Pi I had so as to not upset my working HA setup. However in reconfiguring the VPN I think I spotted at least two mistakes I made when setting it up on the HA Pi so it was a worthwhile exercise!