My Own DNS Server at Home – Part 1: IPv4

I set up authoritative nameservers at home using unbound, which appears to be considerably easier than configuring BIND, but I still can't say that I fully understand it. DNS (and networking in general) is a bit of a dark art.

You can't go too far wrong with unbound and it is seriously fast and light.

Real men cry into their text editors with BIND and PowerDNS but you do get the whole toy box with these beasties. I've whizzed up many BIND daemons. I once ran a pair of PDNS servers with a MySQL replicated back end.

I currently have an internet exposed and rather locked down PDNS for ACME DNS-01 (Lets Encrypt). The CA consortium are insisting on SSL certs going down to 40 odd day lifetimes within about three years. I look after quite a few SSL certs for my customers. Anyway.

For home labbers, you might consider a Pi Hole (doesn't have to run on a Pi - a VM will do) or, a bit more hard core: https://technitium.com/dns/ (web GUI - yay!) pfSense has Unbound built in and I think OPNSense does too - both are fine choices of router. OpenWRT probably has unbound in it.

When I say, you can't go too far wrong with unbound, I mean it. If it works then it is almost certainly configured correctly.

I am just using adguard home as my dns server (installed as a plugin in opnsense). Am I naively doing something wrong, or is that a relatively decent choice as well?