Keeps falling back to "Pi-hole blocking is Disabled"

[ChrisWeiss]

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

Expected Behaviour:

When I enable PiHole blocking, it should stay enabled.

Actual Behaviour:

I click Enable in the web UI or run pihole enable, status briefly changes to Enabled, then falls back to disabled. PiHole is still properly handing out DHCP and processing DNS queries, just no blocking is occurring.

Debug Token:

https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/yu9ip6t4e7

What I've tried:

• Removed all blacklists, rebuilt Gravity
• Added back one blacklist, rebuilt Gravity
• Added all blacklists back, rebuilt Gravity
• pihole -r and repaired multiple times
• Rebooted multiple times
• Checked logs for errors while enabling/disabling. I'm seeing commands getting executed, but nothing to indicate an error.
• I notice that LightHTTPD had disk space errors while writing to logs several days ago (possibly when this started? I dont have an exact time), but there's plenty of space when I checked:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root        15G   12G  2.7G  81% /
devtmpfs        459M     0  459M   0% /dev
tmpfs           464M  764K  463M   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           464M   18M  446M   4% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           464M     0  464M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mmcblk0p1   43M   23M   21M  53% /boot
tmpfs            93M     0   93M   0% /run/user/999
tmpfs            93M     0   93M   0% /run/user/1000

I did purge logs, so we're up to 8G free space on / now.

[DL6ER]

Have you already tried enabling/disabling via Pi-hole's CLI or only through the web interface?

Try

pihole enable

It may be that disable/enable works as expected but somehow the web interface isn't allowed to do it. Can you modify/save settings via the web interface? Is this change permanently?

[ChrisWeiss]

Yes, I was able to run pihole enable, but it would disable as soon as I refreshed the web interface - either method (CLI/Web) would fall back to being disabled. I was able to change the state of various blocklists and the settings would correctly be retained.

[DL6ER]

I looked again at your debug log and found

BLOCKING_ENABLED=true
BLOCKING_ENABLED=false

in your /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf.

Please remove one of them and test again. If two lines re-appear, then we will have to dive deep into bug finding as we haven't seen this before.

[ChrisWeiss]

Ah, great catch! I removed those two lines and the problem appears to have gone away. There is now only the single BLOCKING_ENABLED line in that file.

Not sure what would have caused that.