Submitted 1 year ago by PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca to selfhosted@lemmy.world
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.
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:
“Skill issue bro” s
A 30 day DHCP lease expiration would explain OP’s issue.
I vote for 60 day lease time, iirc the clients try to get a new lease when half of the time is over, so they can keep the ip.
Basically, no static IPs at all. Lol
Definitely a skill issue haha. I’m brand new to this stuff so I’m trying to learn as fast as possible. Appreciate the help and the explanations!
It’s alright, most computer geeks (even professional ones) can’t even figure out how IP addressing works. That’s why networking is its own sub group in enterprise environments.
First thought: Is your PiHole’s static IP within the range of addresses your DHCP server hands out?
My Pihole lives on my server computer and so the DNS is the same IP address as that computer
Irrelevant, unless your pihole is running on your DHCP server. Does the server running pihole have a statically assigned IP that is within the DHCP range being assigned to other devices?
Static addresses should be outside of your DHCP range, ideally. If you can’t change the range, and assuming sequential handouts of IPs from your router among other things, you can try setting the server’s static IP to a bigger number.
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:
github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/4092/
Solution is to add “denyinterfaces veth*” to the dhcpd.conf
Oh my gosh. I have been trying to figure this issue out with my docker containers for months. If this is the fix, THANK YOU.
I have had this issue about a year, while trying different monitoring and logging solutions to try and find out what’s going on.
This was such a bitch! Now I’m spreading the word, so that other won’t suffer as long as I have.
PuHole 🤣
Hahaha! I’m keeping this typo 😂
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.
I managed to get into my router and my Pihole server shows up as static and I’ve assigned it an address at the higher end of the DHCP range so we’ll see when the lease expire 🤷
Don’t set the static IP within the DHCP range (well you can, but it then depends on how smart your dhcp server is, just avoid the situation).
You run a risk of the same IP being assigned to another device.
As long as the router has the IP explicitly reserved for the device your PiHole is running off of then it won’t be reassigned.
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 learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/networking#…
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.
Where does he mention wsl?
Down in a reply to some other comments
I’m very happy with my little PiHole on a Pi Zero 2 W running DietPi, easy set up and then you can just forget about it apart from periodic updates. No issue with it being via WiFi either, which makes placing it much easier.
Are you assigning the static address on your pi, or are you assigning a static address on the router?
Your static IP probably isn’t set on the router
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
[Thread #209 for this sub, first seen 11th Oct 2023, 11:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
What’s the other hardware you run it on without issues?
I ran it on a linux-based NAS as well as a window server. I don’t use Pihole currently, however.
I’ll have to take a peak at the logs. I’ve been running the server nearly headless but with this issue I cannot access my server over my lan so I’m going to have to physically plug a screen and keyboard into it later.
One last piece of advice: Pihole has great support. I’ve gotten a ton of answers and assistance from the Pihole Sub on Reddit. I don’t know if it’s still active since the migration away from Reddit, but you may ask.
Yep, not having DNS/DHCP is a pain in the ass. When mine went down it would take my network with it because the Pihole was handling both. Expected but also a pain in the ass.
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 it’s always …253 and ::253.
For those that don’t know SLAAC is the “new DHCP” IPv6, I had to remember what it was.
Yeah, SLAAC is stateless autoconfig for ipv6. It’s a little like DHCP in that the client gets an address automatically but it’s handled by the client machine rather than having a DHCP server running.
SLAAC capable machines give themselves an address based on the ipv6 prefix advertised on the network then do a duplicate address check with all of the other devices to make sure they’re unique and away you go.
I’d ignored it the first time around and given everything static v6 addresses without realizing that my provider would periodically change my prefix. That was fun to untangle, things worked if they made v4 requests but failed over v6 whenever my prefix changed.
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?
My RPi4 is running PiHole, mailu and HomeAssisstant, without hickups.
Ya from my research raspberry pi is powerful enough to act as a DNS server for a home. I probs wouldn’t put a 4k plex library on it but it should do the job.
In my case however I’m not running a raspberry pi. I have installed PiOS into Windows using WSL (like a lunatic) in an effort to not reformat my whole server computer and install something more practical (like Ubuntu server).
Just fyi you can install pihole on a barebones Debian system too. Mine is running in a Debian 11 vm on my threadeipper proxmox hypervisor. Only gave it 2 cores and 2gb ram and it’s basically transparent to my devices, performance wise. DNS is very light.
I'm running a bare metal esxi server and one of the containers is running my pie hole and it is relatively Rock solid.
I think the original poster should probably just set a Cron job to reboot the pihole every 3 days or so at like 3:00 in the morning and that would solve the problem.
It’s not that much of a strain since it only handles DNS traffic.
When you go to e.g. programming.dev, you computer needs to know the actual IP and not just domain name so it asks a DNS server and recieves an answer like 172.67.137.159 for example. The pihole will just route the traffic to a real DNS server if it’s a normal website or give a unkown ip kind of answer if it’s a blacklisted domain. Actually transmitting the website which is the bulk of trafic is handled without the piholes involvement.
I give my pihole container about 1GB of RAM and one core and it’s good to go (two cores helps with maintenance tasks though.) An entire RPi just to run pihole is such overkill.
Clue in name.
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.
I had reliability issues with PiHole and moved to AdGuardHome a couple of years ago. It has never, ever crashed and the updates takes a couple of seconds. It rocks.
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.
How do you set the static IP for the pi? From your router’s DHCP server, or from pi’s network configuration?
I set it directly on the computer hosting Pi since my router doesn’t let me log into it.
Do you know if your router is acting as a DHCP server? Most do, and if you’ve set up the Pi as one without logging in and turning off your router’s, you’ve set up two conflicting DHCP servers, and that would explain your issues.
There is a chance that the dhcp server on your router actually hand out the same ip address to other client, causing the pi to become inaccessible due to ip address conflict. Assigning the static ip address from the router will prevent this issue.
If your router is from your ISP, maybe you can ask them to give you access to the lan configuration options. ISP routers usually have two accounts, the full admin account which usually aren’t handed out to their subscribers, and a user account that would let their subscriber configure various lan settings.
I have a 5G CGNAT ISP router, but distanced myself from it by adding my own full access router connected via a LAN cable to my ISP one and using its wifi instead of the ISP’s wifi. This prevents the ISP router from stealing IP addresses (it can literally do whatever it wants to its IP ranges as long as it feeds internet through the LAN cable), and gives me full control over local network IP addresses (as I also am not provided any login to the ISP router).
Might be an extra NAT, but that kinda becomes moot being behind CGNAT that can’t open external ports anyway.
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?
Do you use ethernet to usb adapter?
Built in wifi on the mobo
Wifi is not for critical services, get that thing wired.
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.
I mean, it’s SelfHosted afterall.
Sir, this is the @selfhosted community.
Its literally a single docker compose up command and one time log in to your router and changing the DNS.
You act like its some crazy complicated thing lol
Well in my case it’s due to me just not knowing that this other stuff exists and primarily wanting to Adblock with a piece of software that’s well known and well documented as I’m very noob at self hosting and networking 😛 I’ll have to take a look at those other services you’ve mentioned.
Just fyi so you can hate me more, I’m running Pihole on Windows using WSL.
Can I add custom DNS forwarding rules to NextDNS?
friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 1 year ago
One of your biggest problems here is what we call high availability. You have a single point of failure: your one pi-hole server. For any service to be resilient, it needs to be highly available. This means full redundancy for all things in the whole stack that provide the service.
For pihole, this means running a pihole instance on two separate devices, with two separate IP addresses. Your dhcp server will send out two DNS servers with every lease. Most DNS clients will use at least two DNS servers.
If one of the servers goes down, your other, redundant pihole server will continue serving DNS.
This is why, contrary to other recommendations in this thread, I run pihole in docker on regular machines. If one of those machines dies, the other machine will continue serving requests, and it’s easy to launch the docker pihole on another machine and reconfigure my DNS server to hand out the new DNS server address.
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
That’s a good idea that I hadn’t considered. I’ll see if I can get Pihole running on an old android phone I have lying around.
Gooey0210@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
My server and a raspberry are running adguard home
Both have autoupdate with autoreboot. If I need to change something, connect, disconnected, everything will continue working
nbafantest@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I have a google router and It allows me to enter 2 DNS servers incase the first DNS Server doesnt work.
doodlebob@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You should probably also sync them. I use orbital sync for this. github.com/mattwebbio/orbital-sync
floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Or gravity-sync. I use two Pi-holes with gravity-sync and it’s very reliable and effortless.
Limit@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I run pihole on a proxmox cluster (lxc containers), 2 separate IPs and I setup keepalived and made the virtual IP the primary dns ip that my dhcp server hands out, pihole1 is the master and pihole2 secondary. I use gravity sync to keep both piholes in sync. Works very well and I can reboot one at a time without losing dns at all. Techno tim on YouTube has a guide on how to setup keepalived on 2 pihole servers that helped me set it up.
urquell@lemm.ee 1 year ago
This is not an answer to the question at all
Baahb@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah it is? There’s a reason your dns confutation has a backup IP address.