Hello,
after months of pihole working properly, it stopped working during the last days.
Expected Behavior: Blocking ads like it did the last couple of months.
Actual Behavior: after months of pihole working properly, it stopped working during the last days.
On the admin console it shows as "active", but there are no queries blocked. Blocked queries % goes to 0, the only blocked queries come from me doing pihole -d.
While browsing, i have the feeling that some ads are still blocked but most of them show on websites.
I didn't change pihole settings, router settings or hardware (that I'm aware of).
So far i did: pihole -g (several times), pihole -d (there's nothing in there that helps me), pihole -r repair and even a new install with pihole -r changed nothing.
I often read that the problem is queries passing through the secondary DNS servers...when i remove the secondary DNS servers in my router, i can't reach any website at all !
It seems that pihole has a problem reaching/resolving websites...
Your debug log shows that your Pi-Hole is working. This section of your debug log reports the results of testing:
*** [ DIAGNOSING ]: Name resolution (IPv4) using a random blocked domain and a known ad-serving domain
[✓] www.silver-path.com is 0.0.0.0 via localhost (127.0.0.1)
[✓] www.silver-path.com is 0.0.0.0 via Pi-hole (192.168.178.188)
[✓] doubleclick.com is 172.217.18.14 via a remote, public DNS server (8.8.8.8)
It also shosw that over the previous 24 hours, Pi-Hole only received queries from one client (most likely the Pi):
[2019-02-01 09:22:28.106] Imported 166 queries from the long-term database
[2019-02-01 09:22:28.106] -> Total DNS queries: 166
[2019-02-01 09:22:28.106] -> Cached DNS queries: 61
[2019-02-01 09:22:28.106] -> Forwarded DNS queries: 105
[2019-02-01 09:22:28.106] -> Exactly blocked DNS queries: 0
[2019-02-01 09:22:28.106] -> Unknown DNS queries: 0
[2019-02-01 09:22:28.106] -> Unique domains: 13
[2019-02-01 09:22:28.106] -> Unique clients: 1
[2019-02-01 09:22:28.106] -> Known forward destinations: 4
This indicates a network problem with clients finding the Pi-Hole for DNS.
You should only have the Pi-Hole listed as DNS server in order for Pi-Hole to be effective. With a "secondary" DNS server (there is no real concept of "primary" and "secondary", the clients will use any DNS available), clients will bypass Pi-Hole for some or all of their DNS traffic.
The place to start is in your router. Ensure that the Pi has the reserved static IP and that other clients can communicate with the Pi. Some commands that may be helpful:
From a client, run the following commands from the client terminal application. This will check if the client can (1) find the pi.hole on the network, and (2) communicate with the Pi.
Thank you for your detailed reply.
As is said earlier, when i removed the second DNS server and had only pihole in the settings i couldn't reach any website at all!
After trying nslookup and ping, i started troubleshooting by checking my router´s settings. I clicked through each and every menu of my router (fritz box) and put pihole wherever i could - right now it seems to work.
I have the impression that it was a problem of the routers ipv6 settings and it trying to connect bypassing the pihole /changing between ipv4 and ipv6 (specifically, i manually put the pi´s IP as DNS server in the router´s ipv6 settings).
What i don´t understand is why it stopped working after months without me changing anything.
Right now everything back to normal, nslookup and ping work fine and the pihole is blocking like it should!