tailscale, pihole, ubound, roundrobin, nextdns multi account, all work together to make your internet yours

Listen up, you beautiful band of data-hoarders, privacy zealots, and self-hosting enthusiasts. If you’re here, it’s because you’ve looked at your ISP’s default router settings and felt a cold shiver run down your spine. You’ve realized that your DNS queries are being harvested like digital corn in a corporate field. You want control. You want speed. You want the kind of over-engineered setup that makes your neighbors think you’re running a secret government agency from your basement. Welcome to the “Wong Edan” school of networking, where we don’t just “connect” to the internet—we own it.

Today, we aren’t just talking about a simple ad-blocker. No, that’s child’s play. We are building a high-availability, recursive, encrypted, multi-layered DNS fortress. We’re combining Tailscale, Pi-hole, Unbound, NextDNS (multi-account style!), and Round Robin logic to create a browsing experience that is so private and so fast, it might actually be illegal in some dimensions. Strap in, grab your Raspberry Pi 4, and let’s get weird.

1. The Hardware Foundation: Why the Raspberry Pi 4 is Still the King

According to the deep archives of the r/pihole community, specifically that legendary Reddit thread from July 2021, the Raspberry Pi 4 remains the gold standard for this kind of “Homeprod” (Home Production) environment. While some might suggest a smaller Pi Zero, the Wong Edan philosophy demands overhead. Why? Because we aren’t just running a filter; we are running a data center in a box.

When you follow those online tutorials to the letter, as many did with their Canakit Raspberry Pi 4 bundles, you quickly realize that the Pi 4’s 4GB or 8GB of RAM allows for things a Pi 3 just can’t handle. For our setup, we need the throughput. We’ll be utilizing the nvme-cli tools found in the GitHub awesome-stars archives to ensure our storage is snappy if we’re running off an NVMe via USB adapter. If your DNS lookups are lagging because of a slow SD card, you’ve already lost the battle. We want those 1ms response times. We want the NVMe management command line interface to be our best friend, ensuring our logs and cache are served with zero friction.

2. Pi-hole: The Black Hole for Boredom (and Ads)

The core of our setup is Pi-hole. It’s the gatekeeper. Its job is simple: if a domain is on the “naughty list,” it gets sent to the void. But in a Wong Edan configuration, we don’t just use the standard lists. We are building a “Homeprod” DNS architecture. As Mark G. Harvey noted in the Homelab/Homeprod DNS Facebook group, we need our internal DNS to be robust enough that even if the external internet goes down, our internal services (like our NAS or home automation) still resolve. If the internet goes down, we might go for a drive, but our local network should still know where the printer is.

Pi-hole acts as our primary resolver. It handles the ad-blocking, the local DNS records, and the initial query filtering. But where does Pi-hole get its answers? That’s where the madness begins. We aren’t going to point it to Google (8.8.8.8) or Cloudflare (1.1.1.1). That’s giving your data away. We want recursion.

3. Unbound: Becoming Your Own DNS Authority

This is where things get technical. Unbound is a validating, recursive, caching DNS resolver. Instead of asking a provider “Where is google.com?”, Unbound goes directly to the DNS root servers. It’s like skipping the middleman and talking to the CEO. By running Unbound alongside Pi-hole on your Raspberry Pi 4, you are creating a “trust no one” architecture.

Unbound performs DNSSEC validation, ensuring that the records you receive haven’t been tampered with. This is crucial. However, we must address the elephant in the room: DNS over HTTPS (DoH). As highlighted in the Hacker News discussions, implementing DoH requires a significant amount of extra code and HTTP modules. The consensus among the elite is that adding a full HTTP server module just to support DoH can be overkill for a local resolver. Instead, Unbound allows us to keep it lean. We focus on recursive lookups via the standard port 53 or 853 (DoT) without the bloat of a full web stack, unless we specifically need to bridge that gap for external privacy.

4. Tailscale: The Magic Glue of the Wong Edan Network

Now, what happens when you leave your house? Does your privacy end at the front door? Of course not. That would be “Gendeng” (crazy) in a bad way. Enter Tailscale. Tailscale is a zero-config VPN based on the WireGuard protocol that creates a secure mesh network (a Tailnet) between all your devices.

By installing Tailscale on your Raspberry Pi 4 and setting it as an Exit Node and a Global Nameserver, your phone in a coffee shop in Paris can use the Pi-hole + Unbound setup in your living room in Jakarta. This is the ultimate power move. Tailscale’s “MagicDNS” allows you to refer to your devices by name, but we take it a step further. We force all Tailscale traffic to use our Pi-hole. Now, your ad-blocking and recursive DNS follow you everywhere. No port forwarding required. No exposing your Pi to the raw, unfiltered hostility of the open internet. Just pure, encrypted bliss.

5. NextDNS Multi-Account Strategy: The Round Robin Secret Sauce

Here is where we get into the “Wong Edan” specialty. Why use one NextDNS account when you can use multiple? You might ask, “Why the redundancy?” Because we are building Internet Sovereignty. NextDNS offers incredible granular control, but their free tiers have query limits. By using Round Robin logic in our upstream configuration, we can distribute our non-recursive queries (the ones we don’t send to Unbound) across multiple NextDNS endpoints.

Imagine this: Account A is for “Ultra-Strict” filtering (for the kids’ tablets). Account B is for “Standard” filtering (for your main PC). Account C is a “Backup” account. In our Pi-hole configuration, we can set multiple upstream DNS providers. When you configure Pi-hole to use multiple upstreams, it uses a weighted algorithm to pick the fastest one, effectively creating a load-balanced, high-availability DNS environment. This ensures that even if one NextDNS account hits its limit or a specific upstream server is lagging, your network remains snappy. You’re essentially building a CDN for your own DNS queries.

6. Handling the “Internet is Down” Scenario: Redundancy and Backups

As the Facebook Homelab/Homeprod community wisely points out, the biggest fear is the “Internet goes down, I’m going for a drive” scenario. In a standard setup, if your upstream provider dies, your whole house goes dark. In the Wong Edan architecture, we have layers.

• Layer 1: Local Cache (Pi-hole/Unbound). If the domain was visited recently, it’s served from RAM. No internet needed.
• Layer 2: Tailscale Peer-to-Peer. Your local devices can still talk to each other and resolve local names even if the ISP is having a tantrum.
• Layer 3: Multi-Account NextDNS. If the recursive Unbound lookup is failing due to root server latency, the Round Robin kicks in to an alternative NextDNS profile.

To manage this, we use the WSL2-Linux-Kernel sources if we are managing our setup from a Windows machine, ensuring our management environment is as close to the production Linux environment as possible. We use the nvme-cli to monitor the health of our Pi 4’s storage, because a disk failure is the only thing that can truly stop this beast.

7. Conclusion: The Peace of Mind of a Wong Edan Master

Setting up Tailscale, Pi-hole, Unbound, and a multi-account NextDNS Round Robin system isn’t just about blocking ads. It’s about Internet Sovereignty. It’s about taking the Raspberry Pi 4—a device many people leave in a drawer—and turning it into the most powerful tool in your digital arsenal. It’s about knowing that your data isn’t being sold to the highest bidder every time you click a link.

Is it over-engineered? Yes. Is it “Wong Edan”? Absolutely. But when you see that 0% blocked-ad-ratio become 45%, and you feel the snap of an Unbound-cached DNS response, you’ll realize that the internet is finally yours again. You’ve built a “Homeprod” environment that would make the Hacker News veterans weep with joy. Now, go forth and self-host. And remember: if the internet goes down, you’ve got the best-configured local network on the block to keep you company before you go for that drive.

Author’s Note: This guide is intended for those who have followed the tutorials “to the T” but want more. Always backup your Pi-hole configuration before editing the FTL files. Use Tailscale responsibly, and never trust a default DNS setting.