Connection Issues when on Pihole DHCP

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1

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Expected Behaviour:

I recently switched to using pihole as my DHCP server. For the most part, it's working fine but occasionally for some devices I'll have an hour or two where it just won't connect to wifi. This has happened with a Macbook Air and iPhone SE 2020 (both latest OS), but other devices are fine (windows/other).

I would expect that there is no downtime when conencting, but it seems like randomly it's happening with these devices.

Actual Behaviour:

When I attempt to connect, it simply spins as it's trying to connect, or connects without internet (posted about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/14h8zic/ios_issues_on_pihole/)

Even more bizarre, for the phone when I enabled wifi privacy and effectively changed the MAC address, it connected without problems. But when I returned to the original MAC address it would not connect.

This seems to be limited to a few devices, but consistently happening once or twice per day.

I'm looking into possible router issues as well, but it started suddenly when moving to pihole DHCP.

The DNS assignment on the devices is successfully identified as the pihole.

Debug Token:

https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/CA7fAGBV/

Potentially similar issues:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/bexf4q/dhcp_issue_sometimes/

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This one has escaped our attention - apologies.

You could monitor and search your pihole.log for your clients DHCP requests:

sudo grep DHCP /var/log/pihole/pihole.log

Do your Apple device DHCPREQUESTs register there?

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They are registering, I'm seeing all of my apple devices there.

The problem may be solved. As one user pointed out HERE, my debug log was still showing my router as still providing DHCP requests and I had noted that while I did disable DHCP on my router I had not restarted it. Restarting the router seems to have fixed that (updated debug log for validation: https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/NVHpaOVA/, pihole is 192.168.1.18 and my router is 192.168.1.1)

Would that have caused the inability to connect? If both the router and pihole were trying to act as the DHCP?

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