First time visits without 'www.' show as blocked

Help
1

Please follow the below template, it will help us to help you!

Expected Behaviour:

To be able to hit a new previously unvisited website without typing in 'www.'.

Actual Behaviour:

For example, I have never browsed to 'bbc.com' since I installed my Pi-Hole. When I just tried now, I got the pi-hole blocked page. I also ran a ping from powershell to 'bbc.com' and it returned the IP of my Pi--Hole. I then pinged 'www.bbc.com' and it correctly returned the expected IP for this news site.

Debug Token:

6howz77f8s

I assume some people went overboard in their adlists and blocked domains without 'www.' since they are treating it as a sub-domain? Which I think is wrong. Is there a way to redirect or train my pi-hole without going to each list and deleting the offending line?

2

You can whilelist the bare domain for that site. How do I whitelist or blacklist a domain?

3

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the reply. I have been whitelisting some of these. But I am finding lots and lots in the ad lists that are just 'website.com'. I get that www.website.com and website.com are two different things to DNS. But outside of manually whitelisting all these sites is there anything I can do to redirect non-www URLs to www on my side? I know hosting providers and website owners have that control, but do we?

4

You'd have to have some sort of proxy that rewrote all the urls from one to the other. Since each website asset (image, script, directory) would have to be rewritten you may end up causing latency. If that's the direction you want to go through, squid may be able to help you.

5

Thanks for the replies. This is for my parents house and they get confused when they see a site like that "blocked". Just trying to cut down on the calls for Tech Support to me!

6

I understand, we try to make things as simple as possible. Is this something that you've seen increase since the latest release?

7

I have noticed it before the latest release. But would either just not go to the link or put a www. in the URL if I actually wanted to view the content. Was just seeing if anyone else got around this or if there is anything on the Pi-Hole we can do to help.

8

According to your debug log, you have added several additional block lists. Some of theses lists get overzealous and block legitimate things. It's part of the reason we only ship with a few lists.

I think you reverted to the default lists, you'll have a much better experience.