When I type in "pihole disable", the blocking does not seem stop right away.
It seems that it stops after some length of time, maybe 5 or 10 minutes.
Does anyone else experience this?
If I am having trouble with a website, the first thing I would do is "pihole disable".
But I want it to work immediately, not take 10 minutes to work, so that I can continue with the problem webpage.
I have even typed in the "pihole restartdns", but that does not seem to help make it immediate.
As a matter of fact, I have not found an in-depth description of what "restartdns" really does, but I tried it anyway.
Thanks for the tip, I was thinking there was some kind of caching going on.
But I thought it would be in pi-hole, not Windows.
It worked the first time (right after pihole disable).
But after that I get mixed results.
For example, I tried pihole -enable and then ipconfig /flushdns and it did not seem to do anything.
Then I have been doing more experimenting and still can't get it to work every time immediately.
Do I have to open a brand new CMD (DOS) window every time?
I tried that it did not seem to matter.
I prefer to just keep one CMD window open (for Windows) and one Putty session open to talk to the RPi (to enter the pi-hole commands).
Quick summary to make sure i understood everything right:
The first time you disabled pihole and did ipconfig /flushdns the blocking stopped
After that you got mixed results
As an example you told me that you enabled pihole then did ipconfig /flushdns and nothing changed
Then you experimented
Okay, i got some questions.
What do you mean by mixed results?
You told me that you enabled pihole then did ipconfig /flushdns and nothing happened, which is exactly what should happen. So could you please tell me what you expected to happen?
What do you mean by experimenting?
No, you don't have to open a new CMD windows every time.
In my experience, there are two things that interfere with the disabled pi-hole:
The windows dns cache, you can clear it with ipconfig /flushdns OR you can disable it permanently (how to here in section 16). This will increase the load on both pi-hole and the DNS server(s)!
The browser cache, you need to clear the browsers cache for some pages to load correctly. You can do this manually or reconfigure your browsers cache settings.
Yes, flush your DNS cache. Even if you are not on Win (like me) there will be the browser DNS cache that will prevent you from seeing a difference in the behavior of Pi-hole for several minutes (as the browser will not even send out new queries to the Pi-hole).
For the widely used browser Chrome navigate to chrome://net-internals/#dns and press the "Clear host cache" button.
Disabling the DNS cache entirely will increase the load on the Pi-hole (don't worry, we can use it with dozens of clients on an old Raspberry Pi B+ just fine) but not on the upstream servers (Pi-hole does DNS caching itself!).
There are several layers of cache: Pi-hole, operating system, browsers, so you'll need to let the cache expire across those layers (or force it as others have suggested).
On chrome you can use the dev tool (Control+Shift+J), which enables long click on the refresh button with option to really reload everything. This works best for me.