Fresh install failure on ubuntu 20.04

Help Community Help
1

Expected Behaviour:

I suppose a fresh install should work.

Actual Behaviour:

The install process ends with these lines:

[i] Restarting services...
[✓] Enabling pihole-FTL service to start on reboot...
[✓] Restarting pihole-FTL service...
[i] Creating new gravity database
[i] Migrating content of /etc/pihole/adlists.list into new database
[✓] Deleting existing list cache
[✗] DNS service is not running
[✓] Restarting DNS server
[✗] DNS resolution is not available

Debug Token:

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

Note:

  • My linux distribution is KDE Neon, which is based on Ubuntu 20.04. I had to disable the OS check.
  • After initial install, I basically lost internet connectivity (DNS not working), so I had to edit /etc/resolv.conf to restore it. Then I could run a pihole repair and access the admin UI, which showed that the "DNS service not running" and "FTL service is offline"
  • I also tried uninstalling and trying again, but I got the same behavior the 2nd time
  • I looked into the FTL service logs but didn't find any obvious error

Thank you for your help!

2

It looks like the OS is killing ftl:

   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.358 154097/T154101] Blocking status is enabled
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.359 154097/T154099] Listening on port 4711 for incoming IPv6 telnet connections
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.363 154097M] Shutting down...
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.423 154097M] Received: Real-time signal 0 (34 -> 0)
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.459 154097/T154101] Compiled 0 whitelist and 0 blacklist regex filters for 0 clients in 0.1 msec
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.459 154097/T154101] Blocking status is enabled
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.614 154097M] Finished final database update (stored 0 queries)
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.614 154097M] Waiting for threads to join
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.614 154097M] Thread telnet-IPv4 (0) is idle, terminating it.
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.614 154097M] Thread telnet-IPv6 (1) is idle, terminating it.
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.614 154097M] Thread telnet-socket (2) is idle, terminating it.
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.614 154097M] Thread database (3) is idle, terminating it.
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.614 154097M] Thread housekeeper (4) is idle, terminating it.
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.614 154097M] Thread DNS client (5) is idle, terminating it.
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.614 154097M] All threads joined
   [2022-05-14 10:49:42.615 154097M] ########## FTL terminated after 269ms  (code 0)! ##########

pihole.log:
   May 14 10:49:42 dnsmasq[154097]: exiting on receipt of SIGTERM

Can you check the system resources and

3

Hi Dan,

Thank you for your feedback!

I am installing pi-hole on a desktop computer with 16GB of RAM, I checked while restarting the pihole-FTL service and the RAM usage stays at 6.4GB, so I don't think there's a problem with system resources.

I noticed your last sentence is truncated, did you have other suggestions?

4

Sorry, yes it was truncated.

System resources could be more than just RAM utilization.

Can you check your /var/log/pihole-FTL.log file for more instances of Shutting down... along with the next line showing the reason for shut down?

Also check your system logs to see if there is any indication of what may be causing this to happen.

5

Each time I try to restart the pihole-FTL service, I get the same kind of log sequence in pihole-FTL.log:

[2022-05-15 23:08:28.011 415370M] INFO: FTL is running as user pihole (UID 997)
[2022-05-15 23:08:28.012 415370/T415371] Listening on port 4711 for incoming IPv4 telnet connections
[2022-05-15 23:08:28.012 415370/T415372] Listening on port 4711 for incoming IPv6 telnet connections
[2022-05-15 23:08:28.012 415370/T415373] Listening on Unix socket
[2022-05-15 23:08:28.012 415370M] Reloading DNS cache
[2022-05-15 23:08:28.018 415370M] Shutting down...
[2022-05-15 23:08:28.017 415370/T415374] Compiled 0 whitelist and 0 blacklist regex filters for 0 clients in 0.4 msec
[2022-05-15 23:08:28.018 415370/T415374] Blocking status is enabled
[2022-05-15 23:08:28.268 415370M] Finished final database update (stored 0 queries)
[2022-05-15 23:08:28.268 415370M] Waiting for threads to join

and in the pihole.log file:

May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: started, version pi-hole-2.87test8 cachesize 10000
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: compile time options: IPv6 GNU-getopt no-DBus no-UBus no-i18n IDN DHCP DHCPv6 Lua TFTP no-conntrack ipset no-nftset auth cryptohash DNSSEC loop-detect inotify dumpfile
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: using nameserver 192.168.1.1#53
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: using only locally-known addresses for onion
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: using only locally-known addresses for bind
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: using only locally-known addresses for invalid
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: using only locally-known addresses for localhost
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: using only locally-known addresses for test
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: read /etc/hosts - 5 addresses
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: read /etc/pihole/custom.list - 0 addresses
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: read /etc/pihole/local.list - 0 addresses
May 15 23:08:28 dnsmasq[415370]: exiting on receipt of SIGTERM

I can't find any reason for the shutdown in these files. However I dug in the syslog as you suggested and there are a few signs of errors/failures. Here is the complete syslog during the 10 seconds of an FTL restart:
syslog-while-restarting-ftl.txt (27.5 KB)

And here are the lines that look suspicious to me:

May 15 23:08:28 clement-linux tracker-store[415378]: Cannot initialize database: Could not open sqlite3 database:'/home/pihole/.cache/tracker/meta.db': unable to open database file
May 15 23:08:28 clement-linux systemd[415336]: tracker-store.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
May 15 23:08:28 clement-linux tracker-miner-f[415349]: Couldn't create new Files miner: 'Failed to load SPARQL backend: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Message recipient disconnected from message bus without replying'
May 15 23:08:28 clement-linux pulseaudio[415347]: Failed to create secure directory (/home/pihole/.config/pulse): No such file or directory

I noticed that the service tries to access several files under /home/pihole but this directory doesn't exist. Although user pihole exists in /etc/passwd. Is this expected? Do you see something unusual in the system logs?

7

There shouldn't be a /home/pihole but that wouldn't cause issues by itself.

tracker-miner typically only runs on systems with a full Gnome desktop installed. You can try disabling it and see if that resolves any issues: https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/07/how-to-completely-disable-tracker.html

9

I tried disabling tracker, but that didn't have much effect on the syslogs.
So I removed the tracker, and then all tracker related errors disappeared from the syslog:
syslog-while-restarting-ftl-tracker-uninstalled.txt (9.8 KB)
I think it got installed along with gnome-photos that I installed a while back, but I don't use it anyway.

However this didn't solve the problem, the FTL service still stops immediately after starting.
The syslog shows that the pihole user session stops just after FTL has started:

May 16 22:15:32 clement-linux systemd[1]: Started Session c3 of user pihole.
May 16 22:15:32 clement-linux pihole-FTL[7856]: FTL started!
May 16 22:15:32 clement-linux systemd[1]: Started LSB: pihole-FTL daemon.
May 16 22:15:32 clement-linux systemd[1]: Stopping Session c3 of user pihole.

After this line there are errors related to pulseaudio, but that's probably irrelevant.

And in pihole-FTL.log, still shutting down right after reloading the DNS cache:

[2022-05-16 22:15:32.878 7858M] Reloading DNS cache
[2022-05-16 22:15:32.882 7858M] Shutting down...

Could there be a problem with the DNS cache that causes FTL to shut down?

10

Sorry for the delayed reply.

There's a couple of things we can try:

  • There's a debug flag for starting pihole-FTL that might show some more detail.
sudo -u pihole /usr/bin/pihole-FTL debug
  • There are additional flags used in pihole-FTL.conf to enable debugging:

https://docs.pi-hole.net/ftldns/configfile/#debugging-options

Hopefully we can find a solution between those two options.

1 Like
11

This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.