My broadband provider insisted I upgrade to thier latest hub, so a reconfigure of the home network was in order.

And following delivery there was a 5 day window set by the provider to register the kit on their network. Good job I wasn’t planning anything then.

Previously I’d set the old hub in ‘modem’ mode and routed everything to my own router and wifi with a firewall, DHCP and DNS running on a raspberry pi with ipfire installed. It all worked just fine but ipfire had become rather flakey of late due I think to no longer supporting the now older 32-bit ARM chip in my raspberry pi model 1. And my wifi router would only do the 2.4Ghz band again due to being old. So the first intent was to use the new hub to provide those services and gain a modern 5Ghz wifi band. The hub has a simple web interface to configure things.
So undo all the old raspberry pi and wifi router and use the new hub. But that became problematic due to being unable to offer a local forwarding DNS for my own local machines. I run machines locally named ‘minecraft.home’ for instance. The local DNS means my other machines can correctly ping that name, the forwarding bit means anything without ‘.home’ gets passed onto the broadband hub to sort out.

So back to the raspberry pi.

This time I installed pi-hole over Raspberry Pi OS Lite which supports the 32-bit ARM. The only real puzzler was getting the raspberry pi to use it’s own local DNS first rather than the hub which involved the configuration voodoo:

root@rpi:/etc/NetworkManager/conf.d# cat dns.conf  
[global-dns-domain-*]  
servers=127.0.0.1

[global-dns]  
searches=home

So the pi is now a forwarding DNS server. pi-hole has a web interface to configure DNS and DHCP, and the new hub does the external routing, firewall and provides wifi. And I’ve collected even more WEEE items.