pihole-FTL (NOT sure there is a problem - requesting clarification)

[DL6ER]

@jpgpi250

When I use reload-lists , there are no pihole.log entries, when I use reload , the following messages appear in the log (which is what I want, but expected to happen using reload-lists :

What am I missing?

You are right, the description is somewhat inexact, we will change this (however, it will probably go into v5.1 now):

1. restartdns = restarts the entire FTL, incl. config file parsing and history re-reading
2. restartdns reload = reload the DNS cache (this implies reloading the HOSTS files as you've seen) + reload database tables (white-/blacklist, gravity, groups, clients)
3. restartdns reload-lists = only reload database tables (white-/blacklist, gravity, groups, clients), the embedded dnsmasq core doesn't see anything from this signal

@jpgpi250

When you start a youtube video, a request is made to r5---sn-4g5e6nzs.googlevideo.com , which is a cname for r5.sn-4g5e6nzs.googlevideo.com
since r5.sn-4g5e6nzs.googlevideo.com is in /etc/hosts.youtube, I hoped the cname blocking feature would also notice there is a configured address for the A record, but apparently, the cname feature doesn't do that.

CNAME blocking is quite hefty in its performance hit. Due to technical reasons, the CNAME inspection cannot use results from the DNS cache. For one, because the CNAME blocking could be spoiled easily and behave in a way users don't expect and which is hard to explain. For the other part, successfl lookups in dnsmasq's cache immediately trigger a response to the client (which is what we want to avoid!). As the cache also contains all HOSTS file knowledge in dnsmasq, we cannot easily access this.
Hence, CNAME blocking can only respect entries from the black-/whitelist and gravity (everything what is in the gravity.db database) but not the HOSTS files. This cannot even be changed easily so it may be considered intentional.