Pi-Hole shows no queries or clients in dashboard and seeing ads again

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1

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Expected Behaviour:

Pi-Hole should be "working", seeing and blocking all queries on my network as I set on the router level the Pi's IP address and it has been working great for a year but randomly stopped working in the last couple days and I see ads again - not everywhere which is strange. I did no changes leading up to this

Actual Behaviour:

Seeing ads again, in the dashboard it shows 0 total queries and 0 total clients over the last 24 hours. I tried updating to see if that's what it needed but no change in version and no change in experience. I restarted the device as well and no change.

Debug Token:

https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/CwtbshEK/

2

Your debug log is normal. But, your DHCP server (the router) is not passing the IP of Pi-hole as DNS server. It is providing its own IP.

*** [ DIAGNOSING ]: Discovering active DHCP servers (takes 10 seconds)
   Scanning all your interfaces for DHCP servers
   Timeout: 10 seconds
   
   * Received 314 bytes from eth0:192.168.1.1
     Offered IP address: 192.168.1.5
     Server IP address: N/A
     Relay-agent IP address: N/A
     BOOTP server: (empty)
     BOOTP file: (empty)
     DHCP options:
      Message type: DHCPOFFER (2)
      server-identifier: 192.168.1.1
      lease-time: 86400 ( 1d )
      netmask: 255.255.255.0
      router: 192.168.1.1
      dns-server: 192.168.1.1
         renewal-time: 43200 ( 12h )
      rebinding-time: 75600 ( 21h )
      domain-name: "localdomain"
      --- end of options ---
    
   DHCP packets received on interface lo: 0
   DHCP packets received on interface wlan0: 0
   DHCP packets received on interface eth0: 1

The Pi-hole is at a different IP:

*** [ DIAGNOSING ]: Setup variables
    PIHOLE_INTERFACE=eth0
    IPV4_ADDRESS=192.168.1.5/24
3

So does that mean that the router is not set to use pi-hole as it's DNS? I have it set to use that IP as my DNS and then 8.8.8.8 as secondary.

I did just have some Google ads blocked that then worked as soon as I disabled pi-hole but it did not register anything still.

4

All of a sudden Pi-Hole is now showing all the data on the dashboard / working normally.

Not sure what changed, I didn't make any changes outside of disabling pi-hole a few times to load a couple pages

5

There is no reliable concept of primary and secondary when it comes to DNS servers. Given multiple DNS servers available, clients are free to use any of them at any time.

6

Ah ok, that's kind of silly.

Now I need to figure out a failover, I see I can setup another pi-hole but I don't have another Pi to do that with at the moment

8

Why? Are you having reliability problems with the Pi?

9

No but I don't trust it to work perfectly, I've taken measures to help the reliability of the Pi by moving from an SD Card to a SSD but I just want to be prepared incase it does have an issue.

10

Note that the Pi isn't the only single failure device on your network. You have one modem, likely one router, etc.

You will likely find it quite reliable, particularly if it doesn't lose power.

You also have the option of running Pi-hole on devices other than a Pi. You can use a VM or Docker on an always-on device, a cloud server with access limited to your IP, etc. Docker on a NAS is a popular option, as one example.

11

I totally understand, just before I moved to an m.2 I had many SD cards fail so in my mind its the most failure prone device next to my QNAP devices.

I removed the additional DNS entry after my last reply and just now for 30 seconds or I could not browse, definitely DNS related. As soon as I signed into the Pi-Hole dashboard all webpages loaded again

12

Happened again just now on a computer I just spun up for testing, connected to wifi but wouldn't load any webpages. Opened a new tab, signed into the pi-hole dashboard and the webpage I was trying to access loaded just fine

13

It appears my DHCP server keeps getting Rate Limited and after a bit it appears pi-hole gets overwhelmed and stops resolving.

I have conditional forwarding enabled and have had it so for weeks but only now after removing the 2nd dns server do I get this issue, is there a way to leave conditional forwarding enabled but stop the dns loop the DHCP server keeps getting stuck in?

14

I removed the 2nd dns server again and I lost all access until I logged on locally and added the 2nd DNS server back. Something is not working properly with Pi-Hole, I think I will reinstall and start fresh and go from there

15

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