Hi All, I am having a few strange issues since installing PiHole. On the most part it is working fine except for my Amazon firestick.
I have connected my fire stick to the network using both wireless and Ethernet connections. It will work sporadically then say it can not display the home screen. When you check the network settings it is connected to the network but has no internet connection. I get the same issue regardless if i use wired or wireless connections. I have a second internet connection available that is a basic straight out the door connection and the fire stick works fine on that again using either wireless or Ethernet.
I have created a group for devices I want to to exclude from filtering and added all the fire stick interfaces to it. and also whitelisted any of the urls I could see the firestick calling.
I can stream Amazon Prime Video App fine from my android phone to either of my chromecasts via the wifi.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I have tried to upload a debug log but I never get a Token.
My network is
Draytek 2860 router running the latest firmware (3.9.1_BT)
Cisco AIR-CT2504-K9 wireless lan controller running firmware 8.5.171.0 2. 2700 access points
mDNS is enabled on the WLC and my two Chromecasts work ok.
Cisco 3560G switch everything in the same vlan
PiHole v5.8.1 running as a raspi4. Pihole is also running as my DHCP server.
Please upload a debug log and post just the token that is generated after the log is uploaded by running the following command from the Pi-hole host terminal:
(Ticking Upload debug log and provide token once finished before generating the log via Pi-hole's UI would give you a token after generation completes.)
Your debug log looks normal.
Specifically, your group management settings do match your description of what you aim to achieve with them.
You've correctly defined a group for your unfiltered devices that has no blocklists associated with it, the group is enabled, and you've also defined clients that belong to that group exclusively.
The FireTV clients specifically have been defined by MAC address.
Note that when using MAC addresses, Pi-hole would only be able to correctly identify and associate DNS requests of same-link devices. DNS requests themselves do not contain MACs, so Pi-hole can only indirectly infer IPs of those clients which MAC is directly observable on the same link.
In general, any device on a separate link (e.g. behind L3 switching network equipment) won't be visible by MAC. The same would be true for devices in VLANs that your Pi-hole isn't part of.
If that would be your issue, you should see blocked instead of allowed DNS requests for those sites that your FireTV stick would request at the times when you cannot access your FireTV stick's home screen.
Since Pi-hole is your DHCP server, you should be able to assign a set of fixed IPs to each of your FireTV sticks network interfaces, and then use those IPs for client definition.
I set the Firestick to have a DHCP reservation and added the reserved IP address as a client in group management then added the client to my unfiltered group.
I had to reboot the fire stick a couple of time before it picked up of times before it would pick up the new IP address, I think that was just down to the Firestick being awkward.
So far no issues the Fire stick is working as it should.