Hardware: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4
OS: Raspbian 11.6 (5.15.0-60-generic)
All updates up-to-date
Actual Behaviour:
I observed an odd behavior of the DNS resolver. Sometimes I have to restart the DNS resolver manually because loading of homepages is getting very sluggish and some loading are fail. If the page loading is getting slow I check my internet speed. Today again on wieistmeineip.de and it fails. After restart it runs flawless.
There is nothing in your debug log that points to a problem leading to the behavior you see.
Unrelated, two of your adlists are no longer maintained or available:
[2023-02-26 17:27:20.919 7336/T7370] ADLIST WARNING: Adlist with ID 2 (https://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/justdomains) was inaccessible during last gravity run
[2023-02-26 17:27:20.942 7336/T7370] ADLIST WARNING: Adlist with ID 6 (https://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt) was inaccessible during last gravity run
Pi-hole itself is very efficient with resource usage, but might there be something else installed on your Pi which is occasionaly doing a lot of SD card I/O? That might periodically hold up Pi-hole and make it less responsive, which in turn manifests as your web browsing being delayed. Restarting would in fact be temporarily fixing whatever that thing was, not Pi-hole itself.
Do you have any logs (thinking about the files pihole.log and FTL.log in /var/log/pihole) you could show us when there are these sluggishness issues? From your debug log everything seems to have worked just fine at the time you generated that.
You could upload them securely using something like
What type of IPv6 address are you using for your router's IPv6 DNS configuration:
Public GUA (range 2000::/3), ULA (range fd00::/8) or link-local (fe80::/10)?
In the router's DNS it's 2a02:810d:b63f:fdc8:72c3:243d:e38:93e0 for the Pihole and in the Pihole there is no custom IPv6 DNS set. Here a screenshot of the config:
You should avoid using a GUA address:
It's not stable, as its prefix is subject to change at the discretion of your ISP.
As the prefix changes, clients wouldn't be able to reach Pi-hole via its deprecated GUA anymore. Dual-stack clients will fall back to IPv4 after a while, which may contribute to your observation.
Use one of your Pi-hole's ULAs or link-locals instead.
You may also want to consider to prevent your router from propagating an IPv6 DNS server address as local DNS server to its clients altogether - provided your router supports it.
All right, thank you! I hope that will do the trick.
But... when I set now fe80::b4ab:c4d0:9c7f:72db as DNSv6 for internet does it work anyway? I have a dual stack xDSL connection I don't want to use my ISP's DNS.
Yes, as long as your Pi-hole host machine is on the same link as your FB.
In home networks, that's usually the case.
More complex networks with additional routers or L3 switches may split your networks into multiple links/segment, in which case you should use ULAs.
But as you are showing the upstream DNS settings of your FB, and I can tell from your debug log that you've enabled Pi-holes Conditional Forwarding:
Note that by pointing your router to use Pi-hole as its upstream DNS server, you are closing a partial DNS loop. In particular, requests from your guest networks for unknown domains.as well as reverse lookups for similar IPs would loop.
This may also contribute towards your observation of sporadic slowdowns, primarily for clients in your guest network, but could also affect your home network due to the sudden surge in your DNS traffic during loops.
Pi-hole's diagnostics would usually raise some rate limit or DNS max concurrency warnings in that case, but those were absent from your debug log. EDIT: As those are flushed by a restart, this doesn't mean they never occurred. If you observe slowdowns again, you may want to take a look at Tools | Pi-hole diagnosis before restarting Pi-hole.
If you could live with your guest network being unfiltered (spares you from some legal considerations as well), you could simply enter some public DNS resolvers of your choice into your FritzBox's DNS servers at Internet | Zugangsdaten | DNS-Server.
Your home network is taken care of by distributing your Pi-hole's IPv4 via DHCP.
Do you maybe have a how-to for me to config PI-Hole and FritzBox properly? My intent simply is to avoid using my ISP's DNS and use Pi-Hole as an Ad-Blocker.
It would depend on individual network's features as well as on personal preferences what you'd consider proper, so there can be no definite answer here.
You may refer to Pi-hole's FritzBox guide (available in Deutsch as well) for suggestions that also try to highlight potential drawbacks and benefits of available options.
But ultimately, it's your choice what combination of settings you'd end up to be happy with.
Do you have any domains in this time interval that were problematic? I checked through your log lines and everything seems to have worked fine. Every query immediately received a reply either from an upstream server or from cache. I have not been able to identify a single query that did not receive a reply respectively had a delay of one second or even more.
edit
But I see you specified eight (!) upstream DNS servers. As you might know, Pi-hole tries to pick the fastest upstream every now and then. If this choice happens to be a server that replies fast but maybe not to all queries or which doesn't respond every now and then, then this perfectly explains what you are observing: The "fastest" DNS server is re-picked after a restart so the unreliable server is gone until it might eventually be selected again. Reducing the number of upstream servers is very likely to resolve this issue easily.
Not that I know of. But I really had some some of this loops that Bucking_Horn mentioned above in the past. Then I fiddled a bit around and it was gone. Don't know anymore what I've done.
Hmm, yes. I had also checked Cloudflare as spare DNS. But when you say it's contra-productive I remove Cloudflare and let only DNS.WATCH checked.
Okay, now I got such a DNSMASQ_WARN again (Maximum number of concurrent DNS queries reached (max: 150)). Here's the log: https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/eqGmBuMS/
So I think I have to redo my FritzBox and Pi-Hole config.
Let's take a look where those excessive requests come from.
Run from your Pi-hole host machine, what's the output of:
pihole-FTL sqlite3 /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db \
"SELECT client, count(domain) FROM queries \
WHERE timestamp BETWEEN strftime('%s','2023-03-02 03:14:40+01:00') AND strftime('%s','2023-03-02 03:14:43+01:00') \
GROUP by client ORDER BY count(domain) DESC LIMIT 10;"
2a02:810d:b63f:fdc8:72c3:243d:e38:93e0 is the Pi-Hole
192.168.178.23 is my Android Tablet
192.168.178.21 could be the Vodafone GigaTV 2 Cable Receiver
192.168.178.28 is my OctoPi #2
2a02:810d:b63f:fdc8:6531:3642:376d:73a9 is unkown and now unreachable
192.168.178.64 is my homeassistant
192.168.178.34 is my Android Smartphone
192.168.178.30 is my OctoPi #1
fe80::464e:6dff:fe7f:2341 might be the Gateway?
Edit:
And I also followed now the instructions of the Pi-hole's FritzBox guide and I hope it's now all correctly configed. https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/NEa7FeOm/
I also did the IPv6 DNS section and set a ULA and set it in the FritzBox DNS-Section.
