Pi Hole on Debian Not Working - dnsmasq issue possibly

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1

Expected Behaviour:

I am expecting to see traffic/hits against the dashboard charts for dns queries/blocks/clients/traffic etc.

Actual Behaviour:

Everything shows 0's except for the blacklist domains.

My setup is a Debian 9 box (statically assigned an ip of 192.168.1.254) that is running a squid transparent web cache proxy and isc-dhcp server. I have set the dhcp server to give out this box as both the gateway and dns server ip (192.168.1.254). I have configured the box itself to use a DNS server ip of 127.0.0.1. DNS is working and I can get places online, but I can't confirm that pi hole is actually working. In fact it would appear not as everything shows 0's on the pi hole admin dashboard. I can confirm that the dnsmasq.d pi-hole conf file has the eno1 adapter listed.

Does anyone have any idea where my issue might be? If I need to provide more info I certainly can but it will take me a bit to respond as this is for a box I have at home and of course I am at work right now.

2

Looks like my issue might be related to dnsmasq not starting.

Debug Token:

ancky09j9k

But it appears that dnsmasq fails to start due to port 53 already being assigned. I have not been successful in resolving. Any help is greatly appreciated.

3

Sounds like you have another DNS daemon/service running conflicting with dnsmasq.
Below one will display the daemon(s) listening on DNS port 53:

sudo netstat -nltup | grep "Proto\|:53 "

4

Have you tried starting dnsmasq manually? Somehow it seems that you might have multiple dnsmasq processes running. Try rebooting.

5

Ok, I ran that command and got this:

Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State PID/Program name
tcp 0 0 192.168.1.254:53 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 646/named
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:53 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 646/named
tcp6 0 0 :::53 :::* LISTEN 646/named
udp 0 0 192.168.1.254:53 0.0.0.0:* 646/named
udp 0 0 127.0.0.1:53 0.0.0.0:* 646/named
udp6 0 0 :::53 :::* 646/named

Not sure what to make of it though.

6

ok, ran top and found pid 646 corresponds to bind

but not sure what to do next

7

ok, sorry for the repeated posts. did a quick search and just tried stopping bind9 using sudo service bind9 stop

I then tried starting dnsmasq and it worked! I immediately see info in the admin dashboard.

My question is, can I simply uninstall bind9, or possibly disable it from starting?

8

The man pages are a good start:

man netstat

man named

man dnsmasq

To disable named getting started at boot:

sudo systemctl disable named

9

ran
sudo systemctl disable bind9

all seems to be working now. thanks everyone for the help!