Have been running pihole 2 years + with no problems. After hitting disable / enable on one laptop the PiHole seems to be not working anymore, even though it says it is enabled. No sites are listed in blocked domains in the dashboard except those that are explicitly listed in the "Blacklist" area of the web dashboard. Oddly internet ads are getting shredded, but the roku is not behaving...
Expected Behaviour:
Blocking ads on ROKU - CNN, A and E, History, roku home screen.
Actual Behaviour:
CNN showing ads now, ads on Roku home screen, A and E + History apps crash and display ads.
Having the same issue. I checked the router and everything. When I reboot the router it works for about 1-2 minutes and than it seems like the traffic by-passes pi hole. It worked for about 1 year now with no such issues.
@johnnyeightpence, I don't think your problem is related:
You did not mention Disabling / Enabling Pi-hole, and @kathy_belle's description does not include router activities.
If you are still experiencing problems, please open a new topic and provide a more detailed description.
These two statements are somehow contradicting each other:
How can Pi-hole have stopped working altogether and still block internet ads?
From reading your post, it seems that just your Roku streaming device is not being filtered.
There may be a simple solution to this (click for detailed reasoning
It is true that Pi-hole does stop filtering DNS requests once you hit Disable for a defined time span as per your request. You also wrote that you explicitly enabled Pi-hole's DNS filtering again.
Be aware that although you initiate this request via a certain machine (in your case: 'one laptop'), but that this will disable Pi-hole and thus affect all devices on your network that use Pi-hole as DNS server.
During this time, your Roku was able to sucessfully resolve all DNS requests to IP addresses.
Your Roku may now cache IP addresses and continue to use them, so there would be no need to ask Pi-hole (though properly re-enabled) for resolving a domain name.
Normally, DNS cache entries will expire after a certain time.
If your Roku honors the TTL - or Time To Live - as stated in the DNS answer, this problem should resolve itself over time, without further intervention on your behalf. TTLs may range from something like 30 secs over several hours or even days.
If you don't want to wait this out, a restart of your Roku should enforce DNS cache clearance.
Let us know whether your problem persists after a restart of your Roku (in which case DNS cacheing was not the only cause for your observation).
Ok, I'll wait and post an update. I have tried restarting the TCL Roku TV, no results. This morning the ad on the Roku was already gone from the home screen, so I think the TTL theory will prove successful. My son is home from vacation so he has been turning the pihole on and off several times a day so he can get bonuses in candy crush for watching ads.
When I logged into the rasp pi to run the terminal command I also had to reboot it (first time in a long time), because it could not allocate memory (fork error), upon restart it worked fine.
He goes into the web admin and turns it off so the ads appear in the candy crush game, so he has been doing this up to ten times a day to get whatever bonuses they give for watching ads (and terrorizing the rest of us). When I went back in the admin to turn it back on I noticed nothing was getting blocked in the dashboard (said 0% blocked) except sites that are explicitly blacklisted. Maybe everything just needs a cool down period. Still seeing the ads on CNN, can't wait for that to go away, but the dashboard is racking up blocked sites now.
When you disable Pi-Hole, the mechanism is that the gravity list and blacklist are moved to temporary files and FTL is restarted, so nothing is being blocked. If something happens during the process of re-enabling and the files are not restored properly, then you could have a problem with blocking.
I updated gravity and turned all blocklists off, and then on, and then did save and update and after that the sites started racking up again. I'm patiently waiting for the roku ads to vaporize. CNN is playing about 5 minutes worth of ads every 10 minutes.
After four days it is fixed. Ads are no longer present. Unfortunately no way to clear the cache on the TCL Roku TV without a factory reset. Marked TTL cache as solution. Thanks for the help.