PiHole + Unbound in VM *suddenly* stopped working?

Help
1

I have a very perplexing problem.

My two-plus-year-old PiHole + Unbound setup running in a VM on my network suddenly and inexplicably stopped blocking ads this afternoon. It had been working flawlessly since I built it.

What I’ve Tried

I manually restarted the DNS resolver twice, and that allowed things to resume normal operation but for a scant few minutes - and then not at all.

I rebuilt the pihole-FTL database (mv db to db.old, restarting FTL), no joy.

I updated time via NTP, but I’m not using DNSSEC, so I didn’t think it would matter. It didn’t.

Given the suddeness of the failure, and the partial albiet transient success of restarting the DNS resolver, I suspected some basic “system” issue - given this setup has worked in essentially a turnkey fashion since I set it up over two years ago. It has literally been flawless - I rarely have to do ANYTHING to it other than temporarily turn off blocking to allow some ad links through.

My configuration has PiHole setup on a Proxmox VM talking to my internal network over a bridged adapter. There’s barely 13% of my boot file system used. The GUI says only about 26% of memory is used.

I tried a repair install, but it failed attempting to download the latest FTL for x86_64 (404).

I wish I could tell you I had some exotic setup, but I don’t; or had some unusual errors showing up in the logs, but alas. I’m honestly just drawing a blank on what’s wrong. PLease accept my thanks for any help you might offer.

Debug Token

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

3

You have a very old Pi-hole version, released around 3 years ago.

The repair will probably not work as expected because you are currently running an old Pi-hole v5, but the repair process won't find v5 files to reinstall, since Pi-hole v6 was released (one year ago).

Since this is a VM, you can create a snapshot and try to repair the installation twice.
The first try will execute the old repair script and download the new v6 files, but it won't be able to update FTL (as you noticed).
The second attempt will execute the new script and probably will be able to download the correct FTL file.

If this process fails you will still be able to restore the snapshot.

4

It should not take too long to create a new VM with Debian 13.x and Pi-Hole v6.x.x then : That’s the beauty of Proxmox :smiling_face_with_sunglasses: :grimacing: :+1: :+1: