I have fresh copy of PiHole 5 running and loving it so far. It is handling DHCP, internal DNS hosts, and my sole DNS server.
One issue I am having is with resolving entries that do not have the WWW in front. For example, Fedex.com sends me a text with tracking number and it fails to load in my browser. But if I insert a WWW in front, it works fine. One that really doesn't work is weather.com. It forces me back to https://weather.com even if I put in the www. My workaround at the moment is to turn off wifi on my phone and refresh the browser using the carrier's DNS servers.
I'm sure I am missing something stupid. Anyone care to let me know what that is?
To me more clear, weather.com does show up in the query log as being blocked by Gravity. I can click the "white list" button and it will work from then on without the www. But I would have to do this for any new site.
I'm trying to understand what it is you are looking for here, but failing
So, you want to be able to access www.weather.com, but it redirects you to weather.com? That is determined by the website, and not something Pi-hole can control.
What is it you are trying to achieve by visiting www.weather.com instead of plain weather.com?
actually other way around. If I click on a link that is just "fedex.com", it fails to resolve with an error that Gravity blocked it. That is a link sent to me by Fedex, I'm not typing it. If I manually add a www. to the front of the link in my browser it will work. If I whitelist it in Gravity, it will work. In the case of weather.com, it is different. Try it in your own browser. If you enter "http://www.weather.com", it will redirect to "https://weather.com" dropping the www part. Again, it fails but adding the www doesn't work becuase the re-direct strips it out.
I don't understand the problem you are experiencing. Whether you use either of the two following domains to load the site, the domains lead to the same place. The use of http or https as the protocol is not related to any part of the domain name:
weather.com
www.weather.com
What needs to be whitelisted? Are you clicking an email link that leads to a Weather Channel site?
When you post the reply, format that block of text as a code block. Highlight the block, then use the </> tool in the reply window and this will strip the hyperlinks.
I agree that is how it is supposed to work, but for me weather.com fails and is blocked by Gravity in PiHole. www.weather.com is redirected back to weather.com so I can't go there at all without whitelisting it. If i pick a different DNS server, both url's work.
This may be due to the new CNAME blocking feature. If you whitelist the weather.com site, regardless of what happens farther down the CNAME chain that would result in a block, this website will load.
But, let's check to see what is happening:
What is the output of the following command from the Pi terminal:
pihole -q -adlist -exact weather.com
And, in your query log on the admin GUI, what is shown in the status column for the domain weather.com when it was requested? You can take a screen snap and post that directly into a reply.
I'm not sure why a list maintainer would put weather.com on their blocklist, but somebody appears to have done it. This is the drawback to using a lot of block lists.
Your solution in this case is to whitelist weather.com. This essentially makes this domain gravity proof - regardless of what blocklist might block it, or if it leads to a CNAME that is blocked, you are telling your Pi-hole to load it.
You may want to reconsider adding the contents of that list as whitelist entries. There are 7600+ domains on that list, the vast majority of which you won't want or need whitelisted.
