It may be the typical firewall issue. If you'd be willing to participate in our current beta testing, we'd offer you an alternative blocking method you could try for this situation.
Have a look at the README of the FTLDNS branch. Search for a setting called BLOCKINGMODE. Setting this to NXDOMAIN should, at least, resolve the firewall issues. Note that it'll disable the blocking page as a side effect.
I'd rather still have the blocking page as it is helpful to the other people in my household. Did you see anything in the debug log that might be useful?
Yeah I have checked those 2 articles out I have notified the setupVars.config file using the script provided by the author I ran it as a executable .sh file I tried to modify the iptables but that didn't work either
This setting will not affect your firewall at all. It will cause FTLDNS to don't respond with the Pi-hole's IP any more but instead with NXDOMAIN. Hence, the major difference is that your clients will then not even attempt to establish a connection which could time out.
I have changed to the NXDOMAIN setting within FTLDNS as an effort to mitigate 'issues' since enabling HTTPS in lighttpd. Many of the sites blocked end up being HTTPS. The 'pretty page' that Pi-Hole provides doesn't work for them with or without lighttpd HTTPS support. Having this configuration, just changed the browser display from a cert violation to not found. Having no IP returned is a better approach for my setup.
No, the Web interface will work as before, it's just the blocking page that wouldn't be displayed any more. However, as @tomporter518 mentioned, the blocking page cannot be displayed over HTTPS anyways and hence I don't consider this a big loss.
@tomporter518 how's your experience with this new feature?
So far so good, though I only switched a few hours ago. If I notice anything odd, I can open a new thread and describe there. I don't expect there will be any need though.
I haven't yet installed as of yet as I wish to do a clean install to avoid any problems.. How do I install the fltdns branch directly without installing the master branch first?
You do have to install the master branch first as the FTLDNS one installs over the master (it retains the initial pi-hole master settings since the FTLDNS is not released yet as stable).
You can use these instructions once pihole is installed, to switch to the FTLDNS: