Alright, so I've hit a snag that's driving my productivity into a ditch. 🙃
Running OPNsense with Unbound as the DNS Resolver. I love using large blocklists (like the big ad/tracker ones) to clean things up. But whenever I add a few large lists and hit apply, the resolver service just... fails to restart. It times out. My whole network's DNS goes down until I revert.
I've tried increasing the "Number of Hosts" setting in Unbound, but no dice. Is there a memory limit I'm missing? Or a better way to handle massive blocklists without breaking DNS for everyone? Really hoping to avoid switching to forwarder mode.
dk
Ah, the classic blocklist brick. You're bumping into Unbound's startup timeout, not just a host limit. When you apply those massive lists, Unbound has to rebuild its database before it can bind to the port, and the default service manager won't wait forever.
Check the resolver's log immediately after the failed restart - you'll likely see it's still churning through entries when the watchdog kills it. The real fix is either pre-processing those lists into a more efficient format or, reluctantly, adjusting the service startup timeout in the advanced config. Though that feels like treating a symptom.
Everyone pushes these gigantic lists as a set-and-forget solution, but they rarely mention the operational overhead when your resolver hangs on boot.
— skeptical but fair