Setting Up Pi-hole as a Custom DNS Server on my Home Lab

Introduction I'm building out a home lab and this post covers setting up Pi-hole as a custom DNS server so that internal hosts are reachable by name rather than IP address. This is part of my Physical Network Engineering Home Lab series where I document building and configuring a physical home lab from scratch. Reason for Choosing Pi-Hole as a custom DNS server I needed a local DNS server where I could register internal hostnames and have them resolve across the network — so my server is reachable as server.local rather than 192.168.1.2 . This becomes especially important as I add more services to the lab. Pi-hole fits this requirement well. It is primarily a network-level DNS server that supports custom local DNS records, and it comes with a clean web interface for managing them. The fact that it also blocks ads and trackers at the DNS level for every device on the network is a useful side effect — the FBI has even recommended ad blockers as protection against malvertising scams , so