As we know, Pi-hole is just for DNS and DHCP, which works flawlessly for blocking unwanted domains, but results in a failed DNS lookup for affected clients.

Unfortunately, some clients respond to failed DNS lookup by experiencing an irritating timeout or delay, or worse, they respond to failed DNS lookup by hammering retries infinitely, which can really lock things up.

I was wondering, since I already redirect some domains to my self-hosted services for things like NTP, could Pi-hole be configured to route certain domain requests to a dedicated virtual server on the local network whose job is simply to tell every connection attempt, on any port, to fuck off with "connection refused?"

This way, apps that would otherwise behave badly in response to a failed DNS lookup, will instead get a "good" DNS response, and the client will stop bothering Pi-Hole--- And instead waste its time querying a much lower resource-intensive script that just says "no" (or, more ideally, be convinced after one try that their cloud service is simply offline, and give up trying).

If nothing like this exists yet, I may try to build it myself using Python and docker-- But it's such a simple idea, I wondered if it might already exist somewhere. What say you?