PI admin showing spinning wheel

wvkreg · June 9, 2018, 6:14am

Setup; Raspberry PI 2
Raspbian Stretch
Installed PI Hole with Curl command.

After 1day of running and re logging in to the admin console all the stats are gone and i see spinning wheels. In settings tab is see FTL is offfline. I saw many topics like this : SOLVED: Admin page shows FTL offline (and not connection to API), but FTL is running - #23 by MDM.

It does not solve the problem. If i flush logs in settings the problem is gone. How can I fix this please?
Also: when is go to query log it says this: An error occured while loading the data: Connection refused. Is FTL running?

DL6ER · June 9, 2018, 6:18am

Please generate and share a debug token by uploading a debug log (use pihole -d)

wvkreg · June 9, 2018, 9:22am

[✓] Your debug token is: n1iagn5kdf

wvkreg · June 9, 2018, 9:32am

Seems to have something to do with the pihole.log file in /var/log/pihole.

Now that i run this command: sudo truncate -s 0 /var/log/pihole.log

The Web interface works again.

Can i please have a permanent solution? Do I use this? : Log file grows too large · Issue #54 · pi-hole/pi-hole · GitHub?

DL6ER · June 9, 2018, 12:38pm

Yeah, looking at your debug log, it seems your log file was larger than 270MB. Is this something you'd expect (like many many clients, etc.)?

wvkreg · June 9, 2018, 2:06pm

It was 271 MB. I do not expect that at all. I am now running pihole alone, not as DHCP server.
My router (Netgear R7800) has imited DHCP options, i can only set DNS in the WAN settings.
But i use my router as DHCP now. Before i used the PI.

Screenshots for illustration:

afbeelding

Both in both cases it returned the spinning wheel. Why does the log file not shrink or compress or rotate?
What can i do to fix this?

Mcat12 · June 9, 2018, 3:19pm

The log file does rotate and compress. However, you have many hundreds of thousands of queries on your network within 24 hours, and that data needs to be stored somewhere. You have one or more clients (hiding behind your router) who are making a lot of queries.

wvkreg · June 9, 2018, 4:04pm

So how do i figure out which it is?

Mcat12 · June 9, 2018, 4:39pm

Check the queries, see if anything identifies it (amazon device making queries to amazon). It looks like you have devices already pointed to Pi-hole instead of the router, so it might also be the router making a ton of queries.

jfb · June 9, 2018, 4:41pm

One way is to turn off all the devices connected to your router that aren't shown as individual IP addresses (those are tracked individually by the PiHole as shown on your screen shot). Then tail the pihole log, and turn devices on one at a time. You'll soon find the chatty one. I have found that IOT devices tend to do a lot of network queries (phoning home, checking network status, metrics, etc.),

wvkreg · June 9, 2018, 5:29pm

Okay. I will check them out.
Why are still clients in this list of clients of DHCP?
I set the DHCP to my R7800 router more than a day ago!

Ok. i reset the stats using this: How can i reset all pihole stats? - #2 by Mcat12

Now it looks like this after an hour:

wvkreg · June 10, 2018, 6:13am

Again this morning same log file size (271MB). What can I do?
In pohole.log is see a lot of this:

Jun 10 00:00:55 dnsmasq[23983]: 124090 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.4
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131460 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.2
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131460 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.3
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131460 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.1
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131460 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.6
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131460 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.4
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131460 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.5
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131461 192.168.1.1/50030 query[AAAA] wvkreg.stackstorage.com from 192.168.1.1
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131461 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 2a01:7c8:fe11:179::2
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131461 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 2a01:7c8:fe11:179::3
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131461 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 2a01:7c8:fe11:179::4
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131461 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 2a01:7c8:fe11:179::6
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131461 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 2a01:7c8:fe11:179::5
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131461 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 2a01:7c8:fe11:179::1
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131462 192.168.1.1/50030 query[A] wvkreg.stackstorage.com from 192.168.1.1
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131462 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.5
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131462 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.2
Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131462 192.168.1.1/50030 cached wvkreg.stackstorage.com is 37.97.197.3

Some lines later:

Jun 10 00:21:30 dnsmasq[23983]: 131463 192.168.1.1/50030 query[AAAA] wvkreg.stackstorage.com from 192.168.1.1

Why does it query so much?

robgill · June 10, 2018, 12:12pm

Many routers ping out constantly to check your internet connectivity.

Change your router's dns AWAY from your pi-hole.

It should not be set to anything on your local network. Set it to 8.8.8.8 or any other dns of your choice.

You can use Pi-hole as your DHCP and then only devices on your network (and not your router) will be querying it, and the log file will not get so out of hand.

wvkreg · June 10, 2018, 12:14pm

Okay, thanks. But if I change the DNS in the router all my clients will also start to use OpenDNS and they will bypass the pihole. I do not see the use of the Pihole then. I dont want to configure all my clients manually and i cant change DHCP options on the router to set DNS. There is no option to set it up (netgear r7800)

Mcat12 · June 10, 2018, 6:29pm

Are you sure there is no setting like WAN DNS? If not, then you can disable DHCP on the router and enable it on the Pi-hole.

wvkreg · June 10, 2018, 6:41pm

See this topic above for my settings on router. There is one dns setting in the router which i can set on manual or automatic.

Mcat12 · June 10, 2018, 7:00pm

Then try using Pi-hole for DHCP.

robgill · June 10, 2018, 9:02pm

@wvkreg Your router does not support setting a LAN dns. Set your Router's DNS away from your Pi-hole, or it will keep hammering it with requests. You will need to disable DHCP on your router before your Pi-hole can serve as the DHCP server.

To disable DHCP on your router :

On the basic homepage:
Select ADVANCED > Setup > LAN Setup .
Clear the Use Router as DHCP Server check box. & Click the Apply button.

This will set ONLY your router to use the external DNS address (once you set your Pi-hole as your DHCP server, your devices will use your Pi-hole for their DNS queries):

On the basic homepage
Select Internet, Scroll down to Domain Name Server (DNS) and click Get Dynamically from ISP & Click the Apply Button.

To set your pihole as your active DHCP server, follow these directions.

wvkreg · June 11, 2018, 8:14am

Ok all good and i understand.
But then how is the PI my dns server since i set the router to Opendns?
Is it so that if i set the PI as DHCP that i will automatically catch dns queries?

DL6ER · June 11, 2018, 8:25am

When you use Pi-hole as DHCP server it will explicitly tell all clients to use it as DNS server. Your router has no influence on this setting on the client's as the DHCP server is responsible for the entire network configuration. The router will only be used as a gateway to the Internet but nothing more.