ESPN+ Issues - Trying To Diagnose to Find Culprit

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Hi - I just purchased an ESPN+ subscription and found out that ESPN website/apps wouldn't recognize my subscription and the espn+ apps/website wouldn't play any videos. I immediately figured that it had to do with my ad-blocking for pihole (even though I am able to watch ESPN & ESPN2 with my cable provider login through the same apps/websites). Here is what I did to try and get it to work:

  • Just for reference 1 pihole is an old acer revo running ubuntu 18.04.5 and 1 is a raspi zero w - I've had no issues accessing any websites, etc. for quite a while with these 2
  • Added the suggested domains to the suggested whitelist from this link - no change
  • I completely removed the devices (my shield TV and my laptop and my phone) from all blocking in the group management section in both my piholes - no change
  • Completely disabled pihole, rebooted my shield, phone, and laptop, but the problem remained. I double checked the piholes, and no addresses were being blocked.
  • I changed the upstream provider on both piholes from unbound (current provider) to google DNS - same issue, no change

That lead me to believe that the problem isn't pihole but something else. I noticed however that if my phone was not on wifi (mobile network without my VPN back to my pihole connected), the ESPN app completely worked (could manage my subscription & watch espn+ videos), yet if I was on wifi, it did not. With that in mind, disabled my catch-all DNS rule on my edgerouter lite (to route any rouge DNS requests to my pihole), manually changed my DNS on my laptop to 8.8.8.8, and immediately ESPN+ started working.

Based on the above facts, DNS seems to be the issue, however I'm not sure how pihole could be the issue here when it is completely disabled. Anyone have any ideas what I could be missing?

Here is my pihole version (on both piholes)

  • Pi-hole v5.3.1 Web Interface v5.5 FTL v5.8.1

I cross-posted this to reddit as well - hopefully that is ok.

Debug Token:

Here is the token for both my my piholes when they are disabled and espn+ is not working:

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I was able to figure this out by pure luck.

turns out that the way that I have been syncing my 2 piholes together was the issue. I was just using a simple rsync command to keep the gravity.db in sync, which worked for 2+ years (or however long we've been using gravity.db). I reinstalled the host OS on both pihole machines, re-installed pihole, used the gravity sync script instead of my ghetto script, and espn+ now works.

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