PI3B+ crashed while trying to load the browser through VNC which was pointed at www.cnn.com. The Pi completely locked up. Both ssh and vnc were unable to interact with the Pi sessions in progress.
Powered down the Pi and powered it back up.
Now able to ssh and VNC into the PI all looks normal.
Now able to access the Pi-Hole web interface.
The Whitelist is fully populated with the 9 web sites I use.
The Blacklist is empty but the dashboard has the correct number of blocked sites...3,207,678. Refreshing the browser does not change either page.
From the Pi-Hole web interface I have rebooted three times and reconnected each time with the exact same symptoms in steps 4 & 5 above.
The Pi-Hole is operating correctly blocking sites.
The Pi-Hole Blacklist page remains blank.
The Pi-Hole Dashboard still indicates it is still blocking the correct number of sites.
A side thought. I have seen the Blacklist page be blank before after I used the Teleporter Import function. At that time I thought I had messed up the Teleporter Export function and I manually reentered all the Blacklists that I use. I did not wait to test if the Blocklist was functioning.
Perhaps the Teleporter needs to somehow refresh the Blacklist Page after an import?
The refresh button on the Blacklist page does not seem to do anything. I have pressed it a dozen times without any change. Not even a blink like most web pages do when refreshing.
Prior to the crash I had twenty two blacklists entered. They disappeared from the Blacklist page after the Pi locked up while trying to load the Chrome browser that is included in the Raspbian Stretch distribution.
The Blacklists no longer appear on the Blacklists page but are still active on the Dashboard..."3, 207,687 Domains on Blocklist".
I am concerned that the next time the blacklists are updated either:
They will not be updated or
The blocklists will disappear completely and sites will not be blocked at all.
I have reentered the Blocklists several times in the past and it is a lot of work. I have used the Teleporter Import option, restoring a past Export, with the same blank Blacklist page.
As a casual observer it appears to me to be a problem with the Blacklist page but I could be wrong and I am doing something wrong.
Where we are not connecting is the terminology. You say that the dashboard has 3 million domains on the blocklist. Those are from the URLs that are entered. The blacklist page is something entirely different and does not show on the dashboard. Those are actual domain names, not URLs, that you specifically are adding to block.
It is that blank Blacklist that bothers me. Shouldn't it appear the same and show the Blocklists (1 - 25) as it did before the crash?
Will those Blocklists in /etc/pihole from (https://blocklist.site/app/) be updated when the system updates the blocklists? This is the Blocklist page from within the Settings/Blocklists tab on my Pi-Hole.
This is part of the web sites included in one of the blocklists that are shown on the Settings/Blocklists tab and is also in the \etc\pihole directory.
As you can see it is just a text file with the blocked sites urls. So I understand why these websites do not appear on the Blacklist page.
I am still hung up on why these list.1.blocksite.domains etc. no longer appear on the Blacklist page after the Pi 3B+ locked up while attempting to load the Chrome browser (Stretch Version).
If you say that this is the correct behavior and that the system will update properly I will be grateful and let it go. It just seems like an odd behavior that will confuse people like me and cause all of us needless work reentering the Blocklists into the Blacklist page.
It is just an unexpected and confusing behavior to me.
Blacklists are not blocklists and blocklists are not blacklists. They are two separate things. list.1 is a blocklist, not a blacklist. google.com is a blacklist, not a blocklist.
This is not correct. Those lists shows up on the "block lists" page, which is completely separate from the "black lists".
The list of blocklists to which you subscribe (the 25 you noted) is in /etc/pihole/adlists.list.
Your local blacklists are stored in /etc/pihole/blacklists.txt
The "domains on blocklist" that you see on your dashboard is the sum of the domains in your gravity list minus the local whitelist entries. If your gravity list (/etc/pihole/gravity.list) is empty, then you can rebuild it with the following command. Pi-Hole will go to each of the URL's in your /etc/pihole/adlists.list file and gather all the domains, remove duplicates and remove locally whitelisted items.
