Pihole is blocking google

Help docker
1

Expected Behaviour:

ping www.google.com should work

Actual Behaviour:

It tries to ping 192.0.0.88

Debugging so far

  • pihole -q www.google.com shows 0 domains or adlists matching www.google.com

  • pinging google from the docker container or the device running pihole works fine, it's just other machines in the network that can't get to Google.

  • I've tried restarting the pihole docker, same issue. I tried it from another computer that was off as I was setting up pihole and so shouldn't have any dns caching issues and still had the same issue.

  • dig and nslookup from the machines on the network just show that it's going to the IP address where I'm hosting pihole and getting 192.0.0.88.

  • I've disabled blocking on pihole admin page, issue persists.

  • If I stop the pihole docker container, things work again (I've set my router to point clients to the pihole as primary dns and 8.8.8.8 as secondary, presumably that's helping)

So far it looks like only www.google.com is affected. I'm able to get (gross) bing.com, this site, bunch of others. And this is basically a fresh install of pihole from the docker container!

What else can I do to figure out what's going on and get Google working again?

Debug Token:

https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/DrDzxq5a/

2

ping is not the best tool to test DNS.

What is the output of nslookup google.com <pihole host machine IP>, from the same machine?

Are you using a VPN?

Searching for 192.0.0.88 returned a few results showing this IP is used by some VPN providers (like NordVPN): https://www.reddit.com/r/nordvpn/comments/13ii3zk/nordvpn_dns_servers_resolve_googlecom_into_a/

3 
$ nslookup www.google.com
Server:         192.168.0.239
Address:        192.168.0.239#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   www.google.com
Address: 192.0.0.88

The IP address in Server is the IP of my device running pihole.

I also saw those results about the VPN, and it's quite odd that many of the comments were removed. I do have nordvpn installed, but I haven't turned it on in a little while, same story for the other machine that I was testing on, nordvpn installed but not active.

In case it's relevant here's nslookup from the machine running pihole:

$ nslookup www.google.com
Server:         1.0.0.1
Address:        1.0.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   www.google.com
Address: 142.250.64.100
Name:   www.google.com
Address: 2607:f8b0:4006:823::2004
4

For those who find this thread, I had forgotten that I was running nordvpn on the Pi. I haven’t gone back to fix it yet but I will likely need to run configure the one application that needs to VPN to go through the VPN separately from all the other traffic that will go through pihole.