Pi.Alert VS dnscrypt-proxy

When using PiAlert make sure you use the fork https://github.com/jokob-sk/Pi.Alert and not the very outdated original.

For those of you who may seek help on this subject, kind leiweibau helped me in this and that conversations. There is a better and actively developed fork of this project in leiweibau's github repo. So you may want to use it.

Pi.Alert - original is here but there are more recent forks with additional features, such as this one.

/u/thekrautboy probably has the best and simplest option with Apprise here, but, if you're willing to get your hands dirty and just wanting to get the notifications in Gotify rather than email, you could modify the pialert.py script and change the send_email command to a send_gotify one using the Python documentation from Gotify here.

I just learned about https://github.com/pucherot/Pi.Alert

Pi Alert will do the job

There is more than one way to do this but I have decided to use dnscrypt-proxy. We will not be using dnscrypt for the dnscrypt protocol though you could elect to use that as the underlying DNS protocol. dnscrypt-proxy lets's us use a SOCKS5 proxy through which the DNS queries will be sent. We will use a Tor SOCKS5 proxy here. You can choose which protocols should be enabled and which ones should be disabled. There are two points:

I tried installing the RPM from the Fedora repos but it's out-of-date and there were no instructions on how to get it operational, so I went with the manual approach as per their wiki: https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy/wiki/Installation-linux

This is awesome, thanks -- going to look into that now. I found SmartDNS interesting and thought I would share it, it's pretty simple to setup. I can see why it's Chinese focused, they have "interesting" internet access over there :-).

I have been looking into DNS quite a bit lately (Unbound, etc), as DNS lookup performance has been pretty subpar lately. I'm in Perth, Australia, and we're pretty remote so our latency is meh at best, and Cloudflare performance has been all over the shop lately, I think they're having issues in WA). DNS can also cause really routing issues here sometimes as we get better latency to Singapore than Sydney, so we might get shunted off to SG.

I've also been using dnscrypt-proxy2 (https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy) for a while, but the above issues with Cloudflares DNS is what triggered me to look into other options.

I use a min-cache-ttl of 15 minutes, which seems to work well.

Thank you for sharing this tip about, looking into this now :).

Sure. I run dnscrypt_proxy behind a pihole. https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy