The issue I am facing:
I am getting a communications error when trying to dig any address from a newly installed pihole
;; communications error to 127.0.0.1#53: timed out
(Or in fact the equivalent local IP from different other systems)
From what I can see the requests are getting to the pihole and are correctly resolved, but the results cannot reach the system the request is coming from.
Details about my system:
Pihole is running on Debian 12 on a libre sweet potato
Note: unlike similar threads I found this is not an Unbound issue as the resolver is a Technitium instance on a different local machine
What I have changed since installing Pi-hole:
I tried with various settings in pihole, none of which seemed to do anything.
Please upload a debug log and post just the token URL that is generated after the log is uploaded by running the following command from the Pi-hole host terminal:
sudo pihole -d
or if you run your Pi-hole as a Docker container:
docker exec -it <pihole-container-name-or-id> pihole -d
where you substitute <pihole-container-name-or-id> as required.
If you are using Technitium as Pi-hole upstream server, please temporarily change the upstream server to an external public DNS server, then verify if the issue still happens.
This will isolate Pi-hole from other local DNS servers and it will simplify the debugging process.
If the issue still happens, please post the debug token requested above.
https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/gk915GMV/ was uploaded
and yes, it seems Technitium is the issue as changing the resolver to 8.8.8.8 makes it work
Your debug log was run while 8.8.8.8 was Pi-hole's upstream, so we can't see your Technitium server's IP.
Assuming that would be living at 192.168.1.134#53, then by chance your debug log would have caught a failed connection attempt still present in your FTL.log's head:
2026-04-14 07:12:22.939 UTC [4872/F3471] WARNING: Connection error (192.168.1.134#53): TCP connection failed (Connection refused)
2026-04-14 07:12:28.041 UTC [4874/F3471] WARNING: Connection error (192.168.1.134#53): TCP connection failed (Connection refused)
While DNS is UDP by default, it would fall back to TCP in case requests and replies were exceeding UDP packet size limits (and that's more likely to happen with DNSSEC enabled).
That TCP connection error would suggest that something would block DNS traffic to 192.168.1.134, either a firewall on your Pi-hole machine (outbound port 53 TCP) or on your 192.168.1.134 (inbound port 53 TCP), or your Technitium server itself isn't configured to accept port 53 TCP.
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