Pihole recently started becoming nonresponsive constantly

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1

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Expected Behaviour:

PiHole installed on a Pi Zero 2W with lite OS x64. Connected to the LAN using a ethernet cable via an Argon POD case. Unbound is configured as per standard instructions and been running happily for months.
System becomes unresponsive constantly and I'm unable to view the admin page or access via console. Pinging also does not respond. Only temp fix is to power it off and back on again but then it just reoccurs and Im at a lost to why.

Actual Behaviour:

On the first occurance I replaced the SD card with a new one thinking maybe it had failed but this made no difference. I also replaced the power supply with the official one thinking this was also a common cause of problems. Finally I replaced the Zero wtih a new unit I had spare and a complete fresh install but again this doesnt seem to have made any difference.

Could someone more knowledgeable help where this issue might be and potential resolutions? Thanks!

Debug Token:

https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/LYYD4d3a/

2

If you're not able to ping to the hosts IP address, or get on the console, this is most likely not a Pi-hole issue.
For both, Pi-hole is not involved.

Check your systemd journals/logs for errors warnings etc since last --boot:

sudo journalctl --full --no-pager --priority 4 --catalog --boot

Or for the previous --boot -1:

sudo journalctl --full --no-pager --priority 4 --catalog --boot -1

Or two boots back:

sudo journalctl --full --no-pager --priority 4 --catalog --boot -2

1 Like
3

Thank you for the reply.

I did wonder if it was a PiHole update but if so we’d see other people with the same issue. I guess the only other things it can be are the case or even the router. I’m away from home at the moment but will look through the logs you suggest and report back…

4

Probably not... The last release was v5.17.2 in October 11th.
Did you update your Pi-hole recently?

5

Thank you to @deHakkelaar as your guideance in checking the logs has helped me solve the issue.

This issue was not directly related to PiHole but hoepfully it's okay to share my findings here in case anyone else who only host PiHole on their Raspberry device having the same issues will be able to refer to it.

Nov 20 09:20:38 PiHole dhcpcd[586]: eth0: hardware address f8:32:e4:xx:xx:xx claims 192.168.100.254
Nov 20 09:21:29 PiHole dhcpcd[586]: eth0: hardware address e8:2a:44:xx:xx:xx claims 192.168.100.254

In the log after each 'crash' I found the following which showed me two things. The first was I had an IP conflict, which I attempted to solve by removing the IP reserveration from the router and setting it directly on the Pi Zero. The second was the MAC address seems to be changing on reboot.

The changing of the static IP didnt fix the issue but after some googling I dound this post which caused me to add 'noarp' to the /etc/dhcpcd.conf. This seems to have resolved the issue as it's now been two days and no crashing or as I now know to be an IP conflict.

1 Like