Hey you guys!
After such great help with some hiccups during installation of PiHole 5 I am back with 2 small questions:
In normal life PiHole is working great, as expected, and I could not be happier.
However, if I disable PiHole for a certain amount of time, it takes incredibly long ( if at all ) to connect me to the internet without the ad blocking functionality.
The same goes for whitelisting a page. I easily am without internet ( not just on the whitelisted page ) for 3-5 minutes before the Internet is operational again.
This did not happen with the prior's version of PiHole and I am asking myself whether its a hardware issue on my side with the pi or if some mistake in the options is present I don't seem to see.
Thanks so much for your help already!
Expected Behaviour:
When disabling pihole or whitelisting pages the internet and whitelisted page should work quickly after
Actual Behaviour:
When disabling pihole or whitelisting a page the internet at all is not functioning for 5 minuted to infinite.
They indeed are! I got a lot of great help from them till here!
Regarding your questions:
1.This is happening on all my devices which all are Macs. It does not matter whether its my iPad, macbook or stationary Mac, neither does it matter which browser ( firefox or safari ) I use.
The pihole lives on a raspberry pi
this is correct, doing it through the web interface.
yet it did. I had to do a clean install of Pi-hole V5 however so I was starting from scratch.
Ah, all Apple. Do you get a full set bonus for that? Sorry, that was a silly gamer joke. (full sets of armor, meaning pants, torso and shoes of one type often give an additional bonus for it being of the same kind)
But joking aside, it bothers me that this started after your upgrade to V5. But lets do that off as coincidental for now.
Are you comfortable using the terminal on Mac? Obviously you cannot do this on your iPad, but this could be done on either the Macbook or the desktop.
Set Pi-hole to do nothing for a couple of minutes
Get on your macbook or desktop and open the terminal
This might ask you for a password, and what it does is: it will tell your mac to forget any DNS info it knows already. So then we know it must ask your Pi-hole on your Raspberry for new information. Do not worry, this does nothing permanent. It just cleans the short term DNS memory your Mac's have.
Then afterwards, open Safari and see if you can visit your desired site. Oh, did I mention to close Safari before opening terminal? well, i did now. Hehe.
So, lets see if that helps. Because to me, the "long time" you described might just be a cache period that your device causes.
puh, after being able to access the internet again I can confirm that this did not work.
when disabling the pi-hole even after flushing the dns, there is not a chance for me to access any sites. they just load forever.
Oof, okay, so lets not take you off of the internet again before we did some basic tests to see what we can find.
Can you run this command in terminal:
ping pi-hole.net
This should just ask your computer to see if it can reach the pi-hole.net website, and it should, as we are speaking again, so you are connected.
Then try this command:
nslookup pi-hole.net
This asks your computer to get some information about the pi-hole site, since the command before told us it can reach the site at all. Now when you get a reply from this command, please note the "server" line at the top. That will tell you which device gave your computer an answer. We want to know for sure that its from your pi-hole device.
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=30.665 ms
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=36.773 ms
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=37.008 ms
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=4 ttl=54 time=50.931 ms
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=5 ttl=54 time=32.431 ms
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=6 ttl=54 time=33.905 ms
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=7 ttl=54 time=31.234 ms
Request timeout for icmp_seq 8
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=9 ttl=54 time=32.154 ms
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=10 ttl=54 time=34.604 ms
64 bytes from 192.124.249.118: icmp_seq=11 ttl=54 time=29.965 ms
Have you configured all your clients to use your Raspberry for DNS? or not? This can be done in two ways:
You manually set a DNS server per client
You set your router to sent all DNS requests to your Raspberry
If you did the first, could you put one of your clients, lets say your desktop, to not use pihole.. and see if it can browse the internet as supposed to when you interrupt Pi-hole? (danger alert: you might loose connection on all of your devices again when you tell pi-hole to pause again, so only try this if your household is ready for it)
I did set them up on the router to only use the dns of the pi. the second dns I left blank as I was under the impression that the pi would lead me through even if it is disabled. if I check on my phone or Macs in the dns section the pi as dns address is present as well.
I can try that but honestly don’t think so. This is happening in multiple browsers, on multiple devices at the same time. Everytime when I whitelist something or disable the pihole. For me it seems the when whitelisting or disabling the pihole is not forwarding to a different dns and that might cause the issue that there is no internet but I am way to less tech savvy to know.
I am not even sure if the pihole should do so.
so I tried and the problem persists. as it is not really about blocking as this works perfectly but the time in-between where I can not even access sites at all.
I had this issue and it turned out to be a network configuration on the Macs. Check to see what options you have enabled. If your connected via WiFi or Ethernet, just click on that on the network interface and check if you have DHCP or Manual config. Sometimes Macs don’t automatically connect to other DNS servers till they’re rebooted if they lose DNS connectivity or their IP’s change. I’ve also had Macs not respect their DHCP reservation setup at the router and had to manually add the IP and DNS in the settings and disallow DHCP. The gurus here may find some errors on your installation, and that may resolve your issue, I’m just stating what worked for me when I lost DNS connectivity on Macs when PiHole temporarily goes offline.