laptop spamming pihole and getting rate limited

Help
1

Hello,

This isn't a pihole problem (I don't think so anyway) but perhaps something someone else using pihole has experienced. Every so often, not regularly or predictably, my laptop seems to spam pihole/dns and ends up getting rate limited. I've read about rate-limiting and that's not the issue.

It's like my laptop (or maybe browser?? I use Vivaldi) goes through my saved bookmarks and pings many of them, but not all, leading to rate limiting. I'll be web browsing on the laptop then lose connectivity. I look at pihole to see my laptop has been rate limited. When I look at the log, I see line after line of connections from my laptop, bookmarked sites but NOT sites I'm currently accessing. I remove the rate-limit warning, toggle my internet connection (wifi to wired) and I'm good to go again. Happens maybe a couple of times a month. Weird huh?

Has anyone else experienced something like this?

2

I use Brave browser and very occasionally my PC looks up the DNS of every site I have ever visited going back years. I only spot it when it gets rate limited.

1 Like
3

Thanks. So a browser thing then. I'll ask over on the Vivaldi forum. Weird though that it's only my Linux laptop. Doesn't do it on android or windows - or maybe that's just luck. (Android largely bypasses pihole anyway, but that's another story - one that I'm not concerned about)

4

If your main browser is on the Linux laptop that may be why it triggers rate limiting. Would you notice another device doing it if it has a smaller history and doesn't reach the rate limit.
In the brave browser settings one can delete history from very recent going back to a month etc but you cannot delete old history like over a year ago without deleting everything. I don't need my browser keeping details of what I visited 3 years ago.

5

I think I only keep a few weeks history. I'll check later. Certainly it adds up that it's history being pinged rather than bookmarks (as I initially thought) I'll do some investigations later, out of interest.

Btw, I sync history between platforms (android, Linux, windows) and only my Linux laptop is guilty of spamming - to date anyway.

6

I am fairly confident that it is history and not bookmarks. When I was rate limited I saw queries for domains that were not currently bookmarked.

8

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