Looks like my Pihole stopped working. Can be fixed?

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1

The issue I am facing:

Looks like my Pihole not blocking ads. I went to cnn.com , speedtest.net and dailymail.co.uk and I see lots of ads displayed. My Pihole Dashboard is showing activity happening in Total Queries, Queries Blocked and Percentage Blocked.

Details about my system:

Pihole installed on my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Gnome system, AMD Ryzen 7 laptop. I get all my internet thru a wifi hotspot. My hotspot is my old Samsung A71 phone that has a dedicated data sim card installed. I don't have a dedicated hardware router. I have no home network. Just my AMD laptop and that's it, nothing else. No network, no NAS.

Pihole debug log: https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/k4DtPkbL/

What I have changed since installing Pi-hole:

Since getting Pihole installed, the only changes I know of are doing regular Pihole updates. I did not install Pihole, I hired a Linux admin to do it and I have no idea how he did it. I'm a Linux newb.

2

Your Pi-hole has address 192.168.160.24 and your router, which I believe is your phone hotspot, has IP address 192.168.160.91. Your router is acting as the DHCP server, which is the bit that hands out addresses to other clients, like your laptop, and tells them which DNS to use. Your router is telling clients to use itself (the router) for DNS, and that means they are not using Pi-hole.

Received 310 bytes from wlp4s0:192.168.160.91
     Server IP address: 192.168.160.91
      router: 192.168.160.91
      dns-server: 192.168.160.91

Presumably this has worked previously and your phone hotspot would have been giving out the Pi-hole as the DNS to use. Has anything changed recently that might cause the phone hotsopt to change its behaviour? Maybe an OS update or a change of carrier or something?

When your Pi-hole was working, would you normally see all your devices in the Pi-hole Query Log, or would you just see the phone in there?

On your laptop, and connected to your hotspot, what are the outputs of these commands run inside a terminal window please?

ping -c 3 8.8.8.8

nslookup pi.hole

nslookup pi.hole 192.168.160.24
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Here's the Query Log screenshot. I don't know how to interpret it for my devices. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TPSomjXgSpxKaSy56t4iRFJ9wOAk4v7m/view?usp=sharing

Here's the commands:

advait@advait-Bravo-15-A4DDR:~$ ping -c 3 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=113 time=65.0 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=113 time=42.9 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=113 time=43.4 ms

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 42.864/50.424/65.014/10.318 ms
advait@advait-Bravo-15-A4DDR:~$ nslookup pi.hole
Server:		8.8.8.8
Address:	8.8.8.8#53

** server can't find pi.hole: NXDOMAIN

advait@advait-Bravo-15-A4DDR:~$ nslookup pi.hole 192.168.160.24
Server:		192.168.160.24
Address:	192.168.160.24#53

Name:	pi.hole
Address: 192.168.160.24
Name:	pi.hole
Address: 2409:4073:482:ce55:4b24:a3e:177b:82a1

advait@advait-Bravo-15-A4DDR:~$

A few months ago I was having problems with my Pihole and I hired a Linux admin to try and fix it. It worked for a while and then stopped working. I'm a newb so I don't know what he did. Looks like I'll need to contact this person and have him look at it.

In the meantime, do you see any possible solutions? Need any other details?

4

Thanks for those. The ping was just to confirm that the laptop is online via the hotspot, which you've mentioned is your only means of connectivity.

The second command just asks your default DNS server to look up the special domain pi.hole, which is a special pretend domain that only your Pi-hole is able to resolve. As you can see it was Google's 8.8.8.8 server which answered instead, which is why it said it couldn't find pi.hole. That means that your laptop isn't using Pi-hole for DNS, it's using Google. That seems to be the problem.

The third command is the same again except this time it specifically asks your Pi-hole to answer. As you can see, it does answer, which shows Pi-hole is available and works when it's used. Your debug log shows it working too when it's being used.

It may be that something changed on your hotspot and it is no longer telling clients to use your Pi-hole. But it may alternatively be that your hotsopt hasn't changed at all and your laptop's config has changed and is now using Google's DNS. For example some new software or an update might do something like that.

There is some other networking going on in your debug file so perhaps it's down to how the person set it up. Sounds a good idea to contact the person and see if they can advise. Tell them that your laptop has stopped using Pi-hole for DNS and is now using Google.

if you want to take a look yourself in the meantime, on your laptop, which you said is running Ubuntu, do you have a wifi settings page, probably linked from the wifi icon somewhere on the desktop? From that you will be able to drill down into the IPv4 settings and see if the DNS is configured as 8.8.8.8 manually. If so, you can override it with the IP address of your Pi-hole which is 192.168.160.24.

Save that and then run the first nslookup test again and this time your Pi-hole should answer without needing to be specifically asked. If so then you should be back to normal and you'll see your laptop appearing in your Pi-hole Query Log once again.

Edit – I just remembered that Pi-hole is also running from this same laptop. I don't think that should change anything, but it might be better to defer to the person who set it up in case they've done it in a particular way, as I wouldn't want to break it.

5

I added 192.168.160.24 to the DNS field. See screenshot here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rKeJsTSE-YTQe3OAp7bib1sVj8GQgX95/view?usp=sharing I then rebooted and checked and it looks like ads are still not getting blocked.

Here's the same commands:

advait@advait-Bravo-15-A4DDR:~$ ping -c 3 8.8.8.8
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=113 time=46.1 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=113 time=45.3 ms
64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=113 time=58.0 ms

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 45.305/49.773/57.960/5.796 ms
advait@advait-Bravo-15-A4DDR:~$ nslookup pi.hole
Server:		8.8.8.8
Address:	8.8.8.8#53

** server can't find pi.hole: NXDOMAIN

advait@advait-Bravo-15-A4DDR:~$ nslookup pi.hole 192.168.160.24
Server:		192.168.160.24
Address:	192.168.160.24#53

Name:	pi.hole
Address: 192.168.160.24
Name:	pi.hole
Address: 2409:4073:482:ce55:4b24:a3e:177b:82a1

advait@advait-Bravo-15-A4DDR:~$

Anything useful? If there's no obvious solution, I'll contact that Linux admin and have him fix it. Maybe the best solution is I get a cheap Raspberry Pi and hire an admin to install Pihole on that. Or another solution is can an admin setup a special browser instance that bypasses pihole blocking?

6

The screenshot shows you edited the wired settings (see the title of the box you edited), which is referring to an ethernet cable plugged in to the network socket, but since you are using a phone hotspot am I right to say you are connected via wifi, not wired?

Can you take a look at the Wi-Fi section just above it and find the same settings in there, edit them and run the same tests again?

Regarding using a separate device, on a local network devices can talk to each other, but with a phone hotspot it's often the case that they can't talk to each other, and they can only each talk to the Internet. That's because the phone is acting as connectivity outwards, and not really trying to be a proper router. If you got a dedicated device for Pi-hole it may be that your laptop is unable to reach it. It depends entirely on how the hotspot is configured and you typically cannot change how it works.

To fix that you could consider a small 'travel router'. With these, you connect the router to the hotspot and then you connect your laptop and Pi-hole to the router. That way they can see each other and are both on the hotspot. Something like the TP-Link AC750 is known to work for this (Amazon UK, US).

You would install Pi-hole on a dedicated device and a Pi Zero W would work well for this because it easily runs Pi-hole and is wireless so it can connect to the router.

Since you only have your laptop and the hotspot I would be inclined to try and get that working again like it was before. The above is always available as a mini project to expand the setup a little bit later on if needed.

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