I'm sure they are, found a bunch online as a good starting point.
If something in a blocklist is an issue that can cause the whole device to require to be rebooted how do I find out which blocklist that would be? I see no errors anywhere - it just suddenly starts ignoring DNS requests. Could a hacker make Pi-holes all over the world just not work by hacking a blocklist and adding gibberish to it?
Not a good starting point. You should be selective on the lists you use, and don't just grab everything you find on the internet. Good selection of reputable lists here:
I would not call it randomly. I specifically looked for blocklists, I don't know of any tool to test if the blocklists are malformed or anything so how should I quality test them. I don't personally know people that make blocklists so it will always be a jump of faith.
But, to sum it all down, you are saying anyone adding trash to any blocklist can completely crash Pi-hole installations without any errors and this is what happens here + there's nothing I can do about it except guess which of my blocklists might be the most unreliable?
No, I'm saying that if you're adding random garbage to your Pi-hole installation then there's a high chance that you've created other problems with your install.
I'm basing that on this thread and the other thread that really didn't solve your problems:
It's a standard Pi-hole installation on a standard Raspberry Pi 3B+ running the default OS - it is not setup to do anything else. What more can I do to convince you, I tried looking for what part of Pi-Hole causes the DNS to stop working but nothing appears when it stops working. I added a bunch of blocklists, some had at some point some content in them that were not proper URLs and some domains have later disappeared but that's about it.
From what you are saying you keep referring to my blocklists and the resulting gravity list as the problem but then you say "no" when I ask if the conclusion is that those can cause the issue I'm facing.
If messed up blocklists cannot corrupt the gravity list then why are my messy lists an issue? I will clean them up again ofc. per your suggestion but I did that also last time to no success.
Yes, some domains are not responding (could be temporary, could be permanent, I don't know) and some lists contain invalid domains (mostly URLs with port numbers, equal signs, unknown characters attached) - one of the lists to blame is even on the Firebog.net site that was linked.
However, during the output you can see it catching the invalid entries and still building the gravity database so how again does this cause my Pi-hole installation to just stop functioning?
Start from scratch. Completely fresh OS. Run it, it will work just fine. Then after you see it's working you can start packing it full of shit and find out when it falls over. That's the point that you look to see what was the last thing added.
Edit: If you can't be arsed to care if you're loading shit in to the lists then you shouldn't be running a DNS server.
You should go back to a known good configuration - preferably a clean install of both the OS and Pi-hole. Then work from there. From your several posts it appears you have never cleaned up your install to a known good point.