This likely means Pi-hole is started before your network driver was loaded and is nothing to worry about. Did you restart the entire machine for this to happen or does it also appear when running pihole restartdns ?
Pi-hole binds to the entire network stack by using the wildcard address it listens on. Hence, it will work even when interfaces go down and come back up.
It (always) happens when I restart the raspi via the pi-hole settings page by clicking "Restart system" (or by a "sudo reboot" in the shell), not when I just click "Restart DNS resolver" at the settings page
Pi-hole points you to something that is an issue: Interface eth0 has been configured as interface to listen on but it is not available at the time of generating the warning. Hence, the warning is generated as we cannot reliably foresee if an unknown interface may appear in the future.
This is mainly helpful to alarm users that something has changed. For instance, they have configured their Pi-holes to listen on eth0 but then they (or a system upgrade) enabled predictable interface names and they'd need to change their configuration to listen on enp2s0 instead now. Without this change, Pi-hole will behave as instructed and discard all queries from the new interface. From the outside, this looks like Pi-hole has stopped working altogether while it is actually only behaving as instructed.
You can delete the message but it will re-appear on the next occasion of the same issue (on next reboot).
The question is: How do we deal with it? @moderators
Try adding DELAY_STARTUP=5 to /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.conf to delay the startup by 5 seconds. That will give the interface some more time to be available.
I had this exact problem until I used the suggested fix "DELAY_STARTUP=5"
Error message occurred using
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
Fresh Install of Raspbian
SSH Enabled
raspi-config / 1 System Options, S5 Boot / Autologin, B2 Console Autologin
Fresh install of Pi-hole
Thank you for your help. In this way, I can edit the file. Up to now, the pihole-FTL.config had no registrations. So I added "DELAY_STARTUP=5. It´s now the first row. But nothing changes after the reboot. The error-message still occurs. I´m using a Pi4B.
No, the delay of five seconds is enough. I´ve made the mistake to copy jfb´s command line. So, I have been in the wrong folder. Using sudo nano /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.conf works fine.