Hi all,
I've been dealing with and digging this every day for almost two weeks now, thoroughly reading every relevant post here and on Reddit. I think it's time I get valuable insights from the awesome community here.
PS: a little noob, all this (and everything Linux and network) is self-taught, so please bear with me in case I write any nonsense.
Thank you in advance.
Expected Behaviour:
PiHole + Unbound + Wireguard installed on a Ubuntu 18.04 VPS (2GB RAM), up and running, so I can connect all my devices and get VPN + ad-blocking on the go. Apart from Syncthing, no other software runs on the VPS, to keep things as light as possible.
Actual Behaviour:
TL;DR:
pihole-ftl
takes up too much resources and makes the system freeze/crash. The only way out is a forced reboot.
Details
After everything worked fine for a few days:
-
I started getting totally disconnected and losing SSH access every one and then. I can only reboot through the web access via my VPS provider.
-
FTL-DNS is disabled after each reboot, and I have to
sudo service pihole-FTL restart
every time before I can get it on its feet. -
No information in pihole.log and pihole-ftl.log. Finally got a hint in system logs: I was getting a
Received SIGRTMIN+24 from PID *** (kill)
everytime before the system shutdown. Reading here and there I've learnt that this happens when a process is taking too much resources (CPU? memory?) and kind of force the system to freeze / shut down because of that. -
This was happening at least once every 24 hours. I've rebooted the system 3 or 4 days ago without restarting pihole-ftl, and it has been up since then. But now, sudo service pihole-FTL restart is totally ineffective and DNS doesn't start anymore.
-
I have two Raspberry Pis at home (a Pi2 and a Pi3B) with 1.5 million blocklist size (far more than on the VPS) but never been down in 1+ year, so I ruled this out as a possible cause.
-
Name resolution has also been acting weird, I often have to replace 127.0.0.1 by 9.9.9.9 in /etc/resolv.conf before getting it working. I don't know if/how it is linked to the pihole-ftl issue.
Sorry for the long read.