API - expose edit_group for groups.php?

[NickJLange]

As a Network Administrator, I'm looking to expose additional API Functions to enable more targeted domain blocking via scripts (for example, "Disable DNS for Laptop from 20:00 - 06:00") for better peace of mind.

Based on the below code snippets, this seems rather straightforward to add. Are there any good reasons to not submit this a PR? Absent any other guidance, my only planned testing would be to manually overlay api.php into my container and then test out with an upstream automation:

GitHub - 5L-Labs/dns_admin

I appreciate any additional guidance.

Based on:

pi-hole/AdminLTE/blob/c2afe4221ac275a1c082e1d8e14ccbb6113b0e7b/api.php#L112-L126

and

pi-hole/AdminLTE/blob/3f06dd87944b9930585a2c227631f898332e1a68/scripts/pi-hole/php/groups.php#L705-L706

Original Note: [Feature/Pre-PR] API - expose edit_group for groups.php? · Issue #2404 · pi-hole/AdminLTE · GitHub

[Bucking_Horn]

Scheduled DNS blocking comes with a major caveat:
For any given DNS record, the authoritative DNS server also supplies a TTL value, defining for how long that record would be valid. Clients can be expected to cache those records until the TTL expires, allowing for a low load on DNS server infrastructure. TTLs can be expected to vary by domain and record and could be several minutes, hours, or even days.

Pi-hole would start to block DNS requests immediately at your scheduled time - for any new DNS request it receives.

But clients that already have resolved a domain into an IP address before that may legitimately hold on to that known address until its TTL expires. As a result, you may observe your clients to still be able to access content from sites that you want blocked well into your aspired blocking period.

A safer approach may be to have a firewall (on your router or a on a dedicated firewall device) reject or drop requests to a set of blocked IP addresses. Certain firewalls may allow you to dynamically compile those IP address sets from a given list of domains, which would also cover the issue of changing IP addresses for a given domain after its TTL expires.

[rdwebdesign]

Do you want something like this?

Activate group with cron

for me this is only necessary in ssh edit the crontab crontab -e and past this rows : (0 min, 9am, all days, all month, only the week) #Enable Block: 0 9 * * 1-5 sudo sqlite3 /etc/pihole/gravity.db "update 'group' set 'enabled'=1 where name='Enfants_cours';" ; /usr/local/bin/pihole restartdns reload-lists >/dev/null #Disable Block: 0 18 * * 1-5 sudo sqlite3 /etc/pihole/gravity.db "update 'group' set 'enabled'=0 where name='Enfants_cours';" ; /usr/local/bin/pihole restartdns reloa…

[NickJLange]

@rdwebdesign

Do you want something like this?

for me this is only necessary smiley in ssh edit the crontab crontab -e and past this rows : (0 min, 9am, all days, all month, only the week) #Enable Block: 0 9 * * 1-5 su

Apologies for the delay here - yes, exactly this use case - although being able to run through the web-path on demand is nirvana. Do you see issues with database ending up in a weird state due to contention?