Lessons in uncontrolled environments, and a safer Unbound config

The danger in putting out a generalized tutorial, when people can have any combination of hardware, software, and pre-existing environments, is that things can go wrong.

An extreme example of this was someone who eschewed installing Pi-hole, and opted to install on a preexisting install of Linux. No problem, right? WRONG. A bit into trying to do tech support over email, I was able to determine that they were running Linux 2.6. In case you don’t keep track, that version of Linux is 14 or 15 years old. Lord.

More subtle examples came rolling in Friday and Saturday. The most common issues were NTP errors, and Unbound errors that came from people not running the root hint download (or only pasting in part of the command).

I’ve updated the unbound config on the worksheet to be more resilient. If you’re already running with the older config, you can either leave it, or re-edit the conf file in nano. If you do the latter, you’ll need to restart Unbound for it to take effect.

Overall, the performance of the video has been disappointing - especially for the work that went into it. The gratifying part, though, is that there are about 140 confirmations (so far) from people that were able to get Pi-hole running - and that’s just the people that let me know that they completed the project!

That’s a wild thought.

I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback on ways to improve the tutorial presentation. Hopefully that means that the current setup is pretty good, but that’s not a good assumption to make. So… if you see areas for improvement, help your boy out. After all, friends don’t let friends teach badly.

Thanks, everyone!