PI- Hole disaster

[cptnoblivious]

First, setting up pihole should be hard it's a straight forward process.

Second, to go after this (and by 'this' I mean that there could be multiple problems) I would recommend the following:

1. Get your router working properly using Merlin
2. Once that's done, ensure your Pihole is setup (ssh in, check ifconfig to verify the address etc)
3. On the router, make a reservation for ONE device only, set the DNS configuration to pihole
4. Test with that single device to ensure that pihole is serving up the responses, that blocking is working, that the admin webpage shows the stats for the client etc etc
5. Once you are happy with that client working, THEN set the DHCP option on the router. Set only ONE field for DNS with the pihole address and set the option to also serve the routers address for DNS to NO (which you'd done previously). Set no other option, other than remove the reservation you had for the client in step 4.
6. Now see if the problem recurs.

Track every step as you go, taking notes of any error messages in logs or problems you encounter.

 

[BreakingDad]

No it is not. The default IP address of an AX86U is 192.168.50.1.

Yes that's what I meant, weird how they changed it anyway. I changed mine back to the usual 1.1

 

[mrblank]

@mrblank
You are obviously skilled at starting over with your pi & router, so I recommend you use the step-by-step post #16
Less than 6 minutes to install and have running.
Follow what @cptnoblivious states in the next post.

ended up getting another pi zero and everything is working well now! appreciate everyones quick help!!
I did test disconnecting the pi and internet was automatically killed. I also left the dns field 2 blank as mentioned earlier. is there something else I need to do so that doesnt happen in the event the PI is offline ?
Was considering unbound but are there any potential potential conflicts when running a VPN that resolves its on DNS via wireguard ?

 

[bennor]

I did test disconnecting the pi and internet was automatically killed. I also left the dns field 2 blank as mentioned earlier. is there something else I need to do so that doesnt happen in the event the PI is offline ?

Setup a second Pi with Pi-Hole and input it into the second LAN DNS field.
Or either put a public DNS server into the second LAN DNS field and or enable the LAN option "Advertise router's IP in addition to user-specified DNS". The problem with these latter two options is there is a possibility of DNS requests bypassing the Pi-Hole on first LAN DNS.

 

[Clark Griswald]

"I also left the dns field 2 blank as mentioned earlier."
That is my current setup, and I haven't experienced any issues. @bennor has good advice regarding a second pi as backup (waiting for 2 additional Pi boards). I haven't installed Unbound yet, since I did have issues with Unbound failing, when I ran the script via router. A quick google search Pi-Hole PiVPN Unbound

 

[cptnoblivious]

ended up getting another pi zero and everything is working well now! appreciate everyones quick help!!
I did test disconnecting the pi and internet was automatically killed. I also left the dns field 2 blank as mentioned earlier. is there something else I need to do so that doesnt happen in the event the PI is offline ?
Was considering unbound but are there any potential potential conflicts when running a VPN that resolves its on DNS via wireguard ?

I run 1 pi (4b) and one VM (Ubuntu Server 20.04), that way I have fault tolerance if something goes doesn.

That whole "primary / secondary" DNS server is a bit of a misnomer, the client decides how to select which DNS server it uses, so don't set one address to Pihole and one to some 'other' DNS server, you'll have inconsistent filtering down the line.