What happens to Internet when Raspberry down

Help
1

Hi,

I just installed Pi-hole to stop Sonos from spying on me but I have two questions:

  1. What happens to my Internet connections if the Raspberry on which Pi-hole runs is down/fails/is turned off? Will I still have access to the web? What about access (over the LAN) to the Pi itself?

  2. Is it enough on an Asus router RT-66U) to set the IP address in WAN DNS1 and DNS2 to the Pi on which Pi-hole is installed or do I also need to enter the IP address in the LAN DHCP settings?

2
  1. You will lose DNS functionality, but you can point your router to a different DNS server in the mean time since you still have access to the internet.
  2. You only need to enter the Pi-hole's IP once (or twice if required) in the LAN settings.
3

Thanks, but what does "lose DNS functionality" actually mean?

As to entering the Pi-hole's address only once in the LAN settings, doesn't it need to go in the WAN settings as well? That is where I have it now and when I check the Admin console I noticed that all clients are either "localhost" or have the IP address of the router. I guess that shows it is working?

4

Losing DNS functionality means that when you try to access the internet via a domain, such as going to google.com in your browser, your computer won't know where to go and the request will fail. You can still visit IP addresses, such as your router.

The WAN setting is usually only used by your router, and the LAN setting is what the router's DHCP clients use. With WAN, all requests go through the router. With LAN, all requests come straight from the clients, so you see more accurate stats.

5

Thank you very much, that explains a lot. Though I know what the abbreviation stands for I never gave DNS much thought until it was suggested to me that I use Pi-hole to block the collection of metrics by Sonos (the blocking of adds is a nice extra).

Looking at the console I see that some of the queries use the IPv6 protocol. What settings do I need to block those too? Do I need to choose an Upstream DNS server for that in settings a well?

Apologies for these ignorant questions.

6

Are the queries going over IPv6, or are they requesting an IPv6 response (the latter is true if you read IPv6 in the Query Log).

If the latter case is true:
You don't need an upstream IPv6 DNS server, but if your network has IPv6 internet connectivity (http://ipv6-test.com/) then you should choose both IPv4 and IPv6 in pihole -r. However, if you don't have IPv6 connectivity, then the IPv6 queries are basically worthless because the client can't use the response, so you can ignore those queries via:

7

Thanks again. I checked and I only have IPv6 connectivity when I connect without VPN (Private Internet Access) enabled. When I enable it (the normal state of affairs) I only have IPv4. And yes, you are right in assuming I was talking about IPv6 turning up in the Query Log.