Pihole is the only DNS, but no ads are being blocked

Help
1

Expected Behaviour:

Should be blocking ads and showing clients etc on dashboard.

Actual Behaviour:

Not blocking ads, and dashboard is showing zero ads blocked and zero clients.

Thanks in advance for helping me with this. It's my first time tinkering with anything raspberry pi related and I'm really excited to get pihole up and running as a first project.

I'm running a pi zero w on buster lite (latest version), connected via wifi. tried setting up the pihole as the only DNS server in DHCP settings for the router.

Pihole -t is displaying network activity:

04:52:54: reply e6858.dsce9.akamaiedge.net is 2407:8800:bf00:6698::1aca

04:52:58: query[A] outlook.office365.com from 10.1.1.132

04:52:58: cached outlook.office365.com is

04:52:58: forwarded outlook.office365.com to 8.8.8.8

04:52:58: reply outlook.office365.com is

04:52:58: reply outlook.ms-acdc.office.com is

Running pihole -c -j shows:

{"domains_being_blocked":84818,"dns_queries_today":0,"ads_blocked_today":0,"ads_percentage_today":0.000000}

which reflects what the dashboard is saying too.

Also maybe of note is that there is 3 wifi connections which all use the same network in my house. My ISP's modem/router has a 2.4ghz and 5ghz variant and then upstairs has an apple airport extreme connected, which is it's own wifi, but is physically plugged into the ethernet port of the ISP modem/router. I don't know if that's relevant. Sorry guys, complete noob here.

Debug Token:

qwpf8fu825

2

I have a similar situation except my setup is an ASUS Merlin router and RPi 3B connected via WiFi. Here's a list of troubleshooting I tried that might help:

  • check dnsmasq
    sudo systemctl status dnsmasq
  • check FTL
sudo systemctl start pihole-FTL.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl status pihole-FTL.service

  • check FTL version
    pihole-FTL -v

  • debug FTL
    https://docs.pi-hole.net/ftldns/debugging/
    Goes something like
    sudo gdb -p $(pidof pihole-FTL)

  • checkout a fix branch
    pihole checkout <branch>
    I tried checking out an older fix branch which ended up messing with my DNS and immediately reverted to master so be careful

  • possible corrupt db, change it to old

sudo service pihole-FTL stop
sudo mv /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db /etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db.old
pihole -r #choose repair and generates new db
sudo service pihole-FTL restart
sudo service pihole-FTL status
  • check debug log if all versions match (mine was all v5)
    Also check OS (mine is raspbian buster)
    Search for "Name resolution" and see if random blocked domains are there
    Search for "Setup variables" and look at IPV4_ADDRESS, PIHOLE_DNS_1, PIHOLE_DNS_2
  • follow DNS setup methods for router, dnsmasq, or devices
    https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/how-do-i-configure-my-devices-to-use-pi-hole-as-their-dns-server/245
  • change some settings in router
    See if you can access your router's IP address in a browser then go to LAN > DHCP settings and set your Pi IP address for DNS 1 and other DNS blank then disable "Advertise router..."
    Depends on your router firmware if any of this is accessible at all, I noticed latest Netgear firmware is very limited so I switched to ASUS Merlin.

And even after following every post I could find that was relevant, I still cannot get any queries or clients to show up :confused:

3

Hey, thanks for you reply.

I've already tried the repair pihole -r to no help.

I've tried out the other stuff you mentioned too but can't really make sense of it. I dont think my router has dnsmasq

pi@raspberrypi : ~ $ sudo systemctl status dnsmasq

Unit dnsmasq.service could not be found.

pi@raspberrypi : ~ $ sudo systemctl start pihole-FTL.service

pi@raspberrypi : ~ $ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

pi@raspberrypi : ~ $ sudo systemctl status pihole-FTL.service

● pihole-FTL.service - LSB: pihole-FTL daemon

Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/pihole-FTL; generated)

Active: active (exited) since Thu 2020-05-28 03:49:53 BST; 2h 54min ago

Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)

Memory: 0B

CGroup: /system.slice/pihole-FTL.service

May 28 03:49:36 raspberrypi systemd[1]: Starting LSB: pihole-FTL daemon...

May 28 03:49:37 raspberrypi pihole-FTL[233]: Not running

May 28 03:49:41 raspberrypi su[355]: (to pihole) root on none

May 28 03:49:41 raspberrypi su[355]: pam_unix(su:session): session opened for us

May 28 03:49:53 raspberrypi pihole-FTL[233]: FTL started!

May 28 03:49:53 raspberrypi systemd[1]: Started LSB: pihole-FTL daemon.

We are both using raspbian buster. Maybe it's an os issue? Should we try jessie or soemthing?

4

Hey, I think I might've fixed this myself. I ran pihole -r again but this time did a full on reinstall, and this time set that privacy thing to 0, instead of 5. I dunno if that has anything to do with why it now works, but it does! Thanks for your help.

5

Yes it does. Above level 3 Pihole doesn't block anymore. This will be resolved in 5.1.

https://github.com/pi-hole/docs/pull/310

Remove privacy level 4 as blocking does not work in this mode (we will remove it for v5.1). No harm to remove the documentation already now. Disabling any processing effectively disables blocking which is counterproductiv

6

Ahh gotcha.

Would you mind explaining to me what that privacy thing is if you have the time? I'm genuinely a little confused as to what it's protecting and who it's safeguarding this info from. As far as I was aware, only I could see my own pihole info anyway? Well technically anyone on the network can, but even then, they can only see the dashboard stats, and can't login without the password. So why have a privacy setting at all?

7

With Pi-hole V4 and later, dnsmasq does not run as separate process. The correct command is:

sudo service pihole-FTL status

8

Jessie is not supported by Raspbian or Pi-hole. It is end of life.

9
10

Thank you Jfb for your help.

I read the article but still am having some trouble. So in it, it says

"Using privacy levels you can specify which level of detail you want to see in your Pi-hole statistics"

So what I gather is that the privacy level allows me to select how much info I see. But what does that have to do with privacy? Privacy is in regards to how much of my info others can see, so I'm not seeing what difference it makes. Am I missing something here?

11

The settings are for the privacy of others using your Pi-hole. They limit the retention of DNS query history.

1 Like
12

Ahh that makes sense. Thanks.

13

I would like to respond to this and say this WORKED. I changed privacy to 3 actually and it was at 0 before. Been banging my head and trying a lot of solutions but finally got it to work!

14

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