This is likely more a tailscale issue than a pi-hole issue, but I thought it made sense to ask what other folks here might be doing to mitigate it.
I’m running pi-hole 6.1.2 on a raspberry pi (debian bookworm). It works great, no complaints! I use tailscale on the pi and on my android phone so that I get no ads while away from home. It is set up according to their docs.
I’ve found the experience suboptimal. Most of the time it works pretty OK (ads are blocked, no slow queries). But a good percentage of the time I notice a slow browsing response from my phone if tailscale is connected. I see errors in the android “health check” - usually “Tailscale can’t reach the configured DNS servers. Internet connectivity may be affected.”
I’ve configured tailscale as an always on VPN to see if the problem would happen less often (it didn’t) and I’ve set the app to avoid battery optimization.
I know these aren’t pi-hole problems necessarily, but I was wondering if other pihole + tailscale + android users have experienced anything similar?
Haven’t seen this happen with tailscale to Pi-hole but my Pi-hole is running in LXC under container under Proxmox. What I do find is Android on my Pixel 9 pro is stubborn and will fall back to 8.8.8.8 when Pi-hole returns 0.0.0.0 for the DNS lookup.
As for your slowdown when you look at the ‘tailsale status” in a terminal in the Pi-Hole while your phone is connected. Check if you have a “direct” connection or are you being relayed though their servers.
The node "BrBup" had its discovery key change from ac0c5b57dc451aa0 to aab159f2c87358aa around 06:59, then later became "ZZMka" with another key change to 4c6103b4fa7ebd81. This suggests the peer is frequently re-authenticating. Also here are numerous messages like "derp-27 does not know about peer [BrBup/ZZMka], removing route" occurring every 5-6 seconds. This indicates the DERP relay servers are losing track of your peers, forcing fallback to direct connections.
This tells me that some type of network connectivity is the issue.
Prior to moving to Tailscale I use pivpvn (wireguard) and a third party client (VPN Client for Android). I never had these sorts of issues. The only thing that has changed is Tailscale, so it must be a configuration issue with that!