[solved] PiHole doesn't store or show queries - another Pi 5 Bookworm Problem, maybe?

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1

This was first posted in the Pi-Hole community on reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/s/cKFFuah1sO

First off, I'm a returning Pi-Hole user. I had a Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 4B for about half a year back in 2020, but then the Pi died and I couldn't get a replacement at a reasonable price. So my Pi-Hole skills pretty much have atrophied all the way. :flushed:

So last week I finally pulled the trigger on a new Pi 5 and when it arrived yesterday, I installed a fresh Raspberry Pi OS (64bit; lite; Linux pihole 6.1.74-v8-16k+ #1725 SMP PREEMPT Mon Jan 22 13:38:39 GMT 2024 aarch64), updated everything (including rpi-update and rpi-eeprom-updateto enable NVMe boot) and then installed Pi-Hole (v5.17.3; FTL V5.24; WebUI V5.21). Then I added some block lists, made Pi-Hole the DNS and DHCP server on my LAN.

To clarify:
This was a fresh SD card with the latest image of Raspberry Pi OS, written on the card with Raspberry Pi Imager. After everything worked (at least seemed to), I copied the SD card image to an NVMe SSD and that's what I'm running right now (on a Geekworm x1001 NVMe to PCIe board, no SD card).

The other services on that Pi (Syncthing and Samba) are working flawlessly.

Then I waited for about 12 hours and when I checked on the Pi-Hole, almost all clients had switched to the Pi-Hole as their DNS and about 15% of all queries to that point were blocked.

So, naturally I was curious to see what kind of queries there were, but the WebUI only shows me empty query lists (both in the blocked queries view and the total queries view).

The blocked queries view should have contained about 1500 queries by that time, but it's empty.

/etc/pihole/pihole-FTL.db is exactly 80Kb and doesn't change in size although the "last change" date/time gets updated every minute.

For a moment I thought there might be a bug in the theme I had selected, but by now I have tried all themes that came with the standard installation, but the problem remains the same.

Here's my latest debug token:
https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/04rtFhTz/

Does anybody have an idea what else I could check / do?

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In the web admin page you can check under Tools section and the privacy tab and make sure that it is set to "show everything and record everything"

3

The browser may request a time frame that is still in the future for Pi-hole.
Check if the machine browsing the UI would use a different time than the machine hosting your Pi-hole.

Unrelated to your observation, I've noticed in your debug log that you have enabled Pi-hole's Conditional Fowarding.
Generally, that's not necessary if Pi-hole is acting as your DHCP server.

Consider disabling it - if you keep Pi-hole as DHCP server.

Your debug log also suggests that your router is of a FritzBox variety, and those routers support configuring them to tell clients to use your Pi-hole for DNS.

In your case, however, your router is still advertising itself as local IPv6 DNS server.
While you should disable that IPv6 option (see e.g. Unresolved ipv6 adress in my top list - #4 by Bucking_Horn), you may want to consider shifting DHCP server duties back to your FritzBox (in which case you'd want Conditional Forwarding to stay enabled).

4

Yes, that seems to have been the cause of the empty query DB.

Thanks.

I ssem to have confused this setting with the "don't phone home" setting that used to exist in older Pi-Hole versions (if I remember correctly)

5

Thanks for pointing these things out to me.

I actually had forgotten about the IPv6 DNS settings in my Fritz!Box. :flushed:

For now, I have reactivated the DHCP server on my Fritz!Box (and deactivated the one on the Pi-Hole) and set the IPv6 DNS to point towards my Pi-Hole.

I think this is going to be the more robust configuration (with maybe adding a 2nd Pi-Hole for DNS server redundancy).

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