Selfhosted @lemmy.world PerogiBoi @lemmy.ca 1 yr. ago

I’m about to throw my entire Pihole out the window

Every month or so all my devices lose internet and the only way to connect them all back is to disconnect them from the DNS server that Pihole is running.

I set my Pihole to have a static IP but for some reason after around a month or maybe longer, it just fails. This has happened 4 times over the last while and the only fix is to essentially uninstall everything on my Pihole, disable it, and then reconfigure it from scratch again.

I’m not sure what’s going on so any help would be appreciated.

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If you can't access your server and your router's web interface, that's a subnetting/DHCP allocation issue. Nothing to do with Pi-Hole.

For reference, there's 2 ways to allocate static addresses to devices:

Define DHCP range, and configure the application to use a static address outside of the allocation pool.

Give out static addresses by MAC.

"Skill issue bro" /s
Permanently Deleted
First thought: Is your PiHole's static IP within the range of addresses your DHCP server hands out?
Do you run your PiHole on top of Docker? There's an issue with docker and Raspberry Pis which makes the network crap out periodically. So if your PuHole becomes unavailable until you restart your Pi it might be this:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/4092/

Solution is to add "denyinterfaces veth*" to the dhcpd.conf
My first thought on this was immediately "did you also reserve that static IP address on your router to make sure it remains assigned". From what I've read that does seem to be the issue, so that's a little validating.
Are you assigning the static address on your pi, or are you assigning a static address on the router?
Taking a look at your Pihole logs is going to be helpful. Also knowing what kind of device is running the Pihole software may also help.

I had Pihole running on a raspberry pi 3 years ago, and I had pretty consistent issues. I've run it on other hardware since without a problem.

It could be an issue with the SD card, if you're using a raspberry pi. I've also read that the log file can grow large enough to cause issues with your Pihole instance.

So there are a number of possibilities.
Your static IP probably isn't set on the router
I had similar issues when SLAAC wasn't properly configured for my network. Every however many days my ISP forced a modem reboot and if the delegated prefix happened to change I'd start having pihole problems. I finally tracked that down, made sure SLAAC was working everywhere and assigned my pihole container a SLAAC token so its address relative to everything else on the network didn't change and I'm good to go. These days the pihole is always ...253 and ::253.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
CGNAT	Carrier-Grade NAT
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
HA	Home Assistant automation software
~	High Availability
IP	Internet Protocol
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NAT	Network Address Translation
PiHole	Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
RPi	Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC	Single-Board Computer
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage
SSH	Secure Shell for remote terminal access

10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.

[Thread #209 for this sub, first seen 11th Oct 2023, 11:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I haven't done any research on pi-hole (I use firewalla) but is a raspberry Pi even powerful enough to support a small home network?

What kind of CPU/RAM usage for a your unit normally have?
Give an alternative a go, see if you have better luck. There's adguard home, blocky, and Technitium DNS for you to consider.

Alternatively, the window trick should work.
How do you set the static IP for the pi? From your router's DHCP server, or from pi's network configuration?
Not a solution to your current problem, but an alternative to consider depending on your network setup.

I've been running unbound as my DNS via OPNSense. Same capabilities for blocklists, plus some nice privacy benefits with DoH/DoT. I think you can use unbound with pihole too, fwiw, i just don't have a need for that.
Do you use ethernet to usb adapter?
I would HIGHLY recommend that for something as essential as DNS, you should be running it on its own hardware. Considering, as you’ve experienced, that any issues result in a complete loss of normal access to the internet.

You can run pihole on something as small as a Raspberry Pi zero w, then just set it with a static IP and forget about it.

Considering you said you’re currently using WSL I suspect there is an extra layer of networking bullshit that is breaking your routing. If you haven’t already looked at this document, it might have the information you need https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/networking#accessing-windows-networking-apps-from-linux-host-ip

But for the sake of stable DNS services you will thank yourself for just getting a dedicated device of any power level to ONLY handle DNS.
I have up on Pihole a long time ago because of constant issues. Went with self hosted AdGuard and haven't had a single issue since.
Personally I given up on pihole.
it's just caused too many issues blocking sites that my family were using.
And then even for local DNS use case - I figured it makes no sense for me. I can just configure one of my real sub domains to resolve to local IP and be done with it.

No idea what specifically is your issue - but can't you just connect the pihole to monitor and keyboard and look at the logs?
I really don't understand running PiHole when services like NextDNS exist. They have every feature your PiHole would have (encryption, whitelists, blacklists, tracker blocking, and much more), can be used on any device, and won't require maintenance or electricity costs.

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