Pi hole working (sort of, but not all the time!)

[Ian_King]

Just installed Pi Hole on a Raspb Model B Rev 2.

Installation fine and router (ASUS DSL-AC68U) set with Pi Hole as DNS. All looked O.K, with ads being blocked. However I'm finding that sometimes web pages don't load first time. With Chrome I get the message "server IP address could not be found." and "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN". F5 seems to resolve the problem.

It's not limited to any particular PC. All PCs (with different browsers) on my network exhibit the same behaviour.

When pi hole works, it's great but using a PC where you have to keep pressing F5 to refresh the page is just too difficult.

Anybody seen this before and can offer any guidance?

Thanks,

[jfb]

Please send us the token generated by

pihole -d

or do it through the Web interface:

How do I debug my Pi-hole installation?

Method 1: Generate a debug token via the Web interface Log in to your Pi-hole's Web interface Navigate to Tools > Generate debug log Click the Generate debug log button Send us the debug token [debug] Method 2: Use the command line to generate a debug token Login into your Pi-hole's command line Enter pihole -d Provide us with the debug token that is generated after the debug script completes Alternative: Securely sending us additional information Preferred Method If there is additi…

[Ian_King]

Hi - token is 8djj0ovwm3

Thanks,

[Mcat12]

The only error I see in your debug log is that you can't resolve domains using IPv6 upstreams. If you don't have IPv6 internet access, then you should try disabling IPv6 in Pi-hole via pihole -r.

[Ian_King]

Hi,

Thanks, but didn't help. Wonder if this is a resource issue, or something to do with the configuration of my router. Pi-hole seems to work well if I just manually configure my dns to point to it on a Windows 10 computer. If I change the dns entry on my router (an Asus DSL-AC68u) to point to it then this is when I start to get these problems.

Any thoughts?

[Ian_King]

Also notice that if I change my router DNS entries to point to ad-guard's online DNS entries, all is fine which suggests a problem with pi-hole. I'm coming round to thinking about some kind of resource problem with pi-hole on a Rasp B.

Looks like my router creates quite a lot of "queries" when viewed in the pi-hole admin panel. Probably around 30 a second.....

[jfb]

@Ian_King

Any thoughts?

You can use the Pi-Hole as the DHCP server and get the router out of the conditional forwarding loop.

How do I use Pi-hole's built in DHCP server (and why would I want to)?

Using Your Existing Router For Network-wide Ad Blocking You might not need to use Pi-hole's DHCP server: In many home environments, your router also functions as your DHCP server. In this case, you can often set Pi-hole to be the DNS server for your network clients in the router's DHCP (or LAN) settings page, which allows all of your network clients to block ads simply by connecting to the network. Setting it up this way is also what makes Pi-hole very powerful for network-wide ad blocking. …

[jfb]

@Ian_King

Looks like my router creates quite a lot of “queries” when viewed in the pi-hole admin panel. Probably around 30 a second…

Please post some examples of this from your Pi-Hole log.

[Ian_King]

Sure,

What logs do you want?

I've now powered off the Pi, since it wasn't working well enough for me. Are the contents of the logs retained through a power-cycle?

[Jeroen1]

Could be a dns loop.
Client requesting dns on your router, upstream dns in your router to pihole?
And pihole upstream dns to router.

[jfb]

@Ian_King

What logs do you want?

Are the contents of the logs retained through a power-cycle?

The pihole log is located at /var/log/pihole.log , and it rotates at midnight every night. The previous day's log is the same name with ".1" trailing.