Every month or so all my devices lose internet and the only way to connect them all back is to disconnect them from the DNS server that Pihole is running.
I set my Pihole to have a static IP but for some reason after around a month or maybe longer, it just fails. This has happened 4 times over the last while and the only fix is to essentially uninstall everything on my Pihole, disable it, and then reconfigure it from scratch again.
I’m not sure what’s going on so any help would be appreciated.
If you can’t access your server and your router’s web interface, that’s a subnetting/DHCP allocation issue. Nothing to do with Pi-Hole.
For reference, there’s 2 ways to allocate static addresses to devices:
- Define DHCP range, and configure the application to use a static address outside of the allocation pool.
- Give out static addresses by MAC.
“Skill issue bro” /s
A 30 day DHCP lease expiration would explain OP’s issue.
I vote for 60 day lease time, iirc the clients try to get a new lease when half of the time is over, so they can keep the ip.
Maybe, but I suspect it’s working like this:
- Pi boots then requests locally configured IP from DHCP server
- DHCP server grants 30 day lease for requested IP
- Pihole runs fine for awhile, DNS requests are properly handled
- IP lease expires, DHCP server returns IP to available address pool but doesn’t reassign it to anything yet
- time passes
- Random wireless device connects to router, DHCP server assigns IP to new device
- DNS requests to Pihole fail because the IP was assigned to the recently connected wireless device
This would explain why Pihole appears to cause problems every month, sometimes a little longer.
Basically, no static IPs at all. Lol
Definitely a skill issue haha. I’m brand new to this stuff so I’m trying to learn as fast as possible. Appreciate the help and the explanations!
It’s alright, most computer geeks (even professional ones) can’t even figure out how IP addressing works. That’s why networking is its own sub group in enterprise environments.
If you’re a computer geek (even a professional one) and struggle with IP addressing, you won’t be having much of a career.
First thought: Is your PiHole’s static IP within the range of addresses your DHCP server hands out?
My Pihole lives on my server computer and so the DNS is the same IP address as that computer
Do you run your PiHole on top of Docker? There’s an issue with docker and Raspberry Pis which makes the network crap out periodically. So if your PuHole becomes unavailable until you restart your Pi it might be this:
https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/4092/
Solution is to add “denyinterfaces veth*” to the dhcpd.conf
Oh my gosh. I have been trying to figure this issue out with my docker containers for months. If this is the fix, THANK YOU.
My first thought on this was immediately “did you also reserve that static IP address on your router to make sure it remains assigned”. From what I’ve read that does seem to be the issue, so that’s a little validating.
I managed to get into my router and my Pihole server shows up as static and I’ve assigned it an address at the higher end of the DHCP range so we’ll see when the lease expire 🤷
Don’t set the static IP within the DHCP range (well you can, but it then depends on how smart your dhcp server is, just avoid the situation).
You run a risk of the same IP being assigned to another device.
As long as the router has the IP explicitly reserved for the device your PiHole is running off of then it won’t be reassigned.
I would HIGHLY recommend that for something as essential as DNS, you should be running it on its own hardware. Considering, as you’ve experienced, that any issues result in a complete loss of normal access to the internet.
You can run pihole on something as small as a Raspberry Pi zero w, then just set it with a static IP and forget about it.
Considering you said you’re currently using WSL I suspect there is an extra layer of networking bullshit that is breaking your routing. If you haven’t already looked at this document, it might have the information you need https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/networking#accessing-windows-networking-apps-from-linux-host-ip
But for the sake of stable DNS services you will thank yourself for just getting a dedicated device of any power level to ONLY handle DNS.
Where does he mention wsl?
Taking a look at your Pihole logs is going to be helpful. Also knowing what kind of device is running the Pihole software may also help.
I had Pihole running on a raspberry pi 3 years ago, and I had pretty consistent issues. I’ve run it on other hardware since without a problem.
It could be an issue with the SD card, if you’re using a raspberry pi. I’ve also read that the log file can grow large enough to cause issues with your Pihole instance.
So there are a number of possibilities.
I’ll have to take a peak at the logs. I’ve been running the server nearly headless but with this issue I cannot access my server over my lan so I’m going to have to physically plug a screen and keyboard into it later.
Yep, not having DNS/DHCP is a pain in the ass. When mine went down it would take my network with it because the Pihole was handling both. Expected but also a pain in the ass.
I had similar issues when SLAAC wasn’t properly configured for my network. Every however many days my ISP forced a modem reboot and if the delegated prefix happened to change I’d start having pihole problems. I finally tracked that down, made sure SLAAC was working everywhere and assigned my pihole container a SLAAC token so its address relative to everything else on the network didn’t change and I’m good to go. These days the pihole is always …253 and ::253.
For those that don’t know SLAAC is the “new DHCP” IPv6, I had to remember what it was.
Yeah, SLAAC is stateless autoconfig for ipv6. It’s a little like DHCP in that the client gets an address automatically but it’s handled by the client machine rather than having a DHCP server running.
SLAAC capable machines give themselves an address based on the ipv6 prefix advertised on the network then do a duplicate address check with all of the other devices to make sure they’re unique and away you go. There’s no central tracking of all dynamic addresses on the network segment, hence the stateless part of the name, but you can poll them with a neighbor request or broadcast ping when you want to see what’s there. The benefit is that basically everything you plug into your network probably supports SLAAC out of the box without needing to run server software anywhere to delegate addresses so new v6 clients just work without specific configuration.
If the client supports it you can specify a SLAAC token that the machine will combine with the advertised network prefix rather than generating its own, which is how I have pihole showing up at ::253 as well as its DHCPv4 assigned …253. It’s a convenient configuration.
I’d ignored SLAAC the first time around and given everything static v6 addresses without realizing that my provider would periodically change my prefix. That was fun to untangle, things worked if they made v4 requests but failed over v6 whenever my prefix changed so the failure mode appeared to be somewhat random depending on whether the service or application supported dual stack and was trying to connect over broken v6. Fun times.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System HA Home Assistant automation software ~ High Availability IP Internet Protocol NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
[Thread #209 for this sub, first seen 11th Oct 2023, 11:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Your static IP probably isn’t set on the router
I haven’t done any research on pi-hole (I use firewalla) but is a raspberry Pi even powerful enough to support a small home network?
What kind of CPU/RAM usage for a your unit normally have?
My RPi4 is running PiHole, mailu and HomeAssisstant, without hickups.
Clue in name.
Ya from my research raspberry pi is powerful enough to act as a DNS server for a home. I probs wouldn’t put a 4k plex library on it but it should do the job.
In my case however I’m not running a raspberry pi. I have installed PiOS into Windows using WSL (like a lunatic) in an effort to not reformat my whole server computer and install something more practical (like Ubuntu server).
I’m running a bare metal esxi server and one of the containers is running my pie hole and it is relatively Rock solid.
I think the original poster should probably just set a Cron job to reboot the pihole every 3 days or so at like 3:00 in the morning and that would solve the problem.
That’s a decent idea for a workaround but I think I found my issue and have set my static IP address for my server to be outside my DHCP range. Here’s hoping it works. I’ll know in 90 days haha.
I give my pihole container about 1GB of RAM and one core and it’s good to go (two cores helps with maintenance tasks though.) An entire RPi just to run pihole is such overkill.
It’s not that much of a strain since it only handles DNS traffic.
When you go to e.g. programming.dev, you computer needs to know the actual IP and not just domain name so it asks a DNS server and recieves an answer like 172.67.137.159 for example. The pihole will just route the traffic to a real DNS server if it’s a normal website or give a unkown ip kind of answer if it’s a blacklisted domain. Actually transmitting the website which is the bulk of trafic is handled without the piholes involvement.
How do you set the static IP for the pi? From your router’s DHCP server, or from pi’s network configuration?
I set it directly on the computer hosting Pi since my router doesn’t let me log into it.
There is a chance that the dhcp server on your router actually hand out the same ip address to other client, causing the pi to become inaccessible due to ip address conflict. Assigning the static ip address from the router will prevent this issue.
If your router is from your ISP, maybe you can ask them to give you access to the lan configuration options. ISP routers usually have two accounts, the full admin account which usually aren’t handed out to their subscribers, and a user account that would let their subscriber configure various lan settings.
At one point my router would let me log into it using its IP address but now it does not let me no matter what IP I type.
This all would have been much simpler had I been able to log in and set a static IP on my home server from there and disabled DHCP 🤪
What’s the router’s brand and model? Googling it might give you the answer. The administrative page for the router might be hosted on custom ports instead of port 80.
Yeah I tried doing that initially. It’s a Bell Homehub3000 and all the login addresses suggested online that I tried were no dice. I probably have to factory reset the router but that would mean redoing my entire smarthome and IOT setup which I’m really not looking to do 😅
That’s suck. I actually had similar issues where the router’s login page would refuse to log me in, even though I actually can login to the router using SSH. No other fix but to reset the router and start again, but time I export the router’s settings (most router has settings import/export feature) after I got everything setup so I don’t have to do it from scratch when the router crap out again.
For me it’s as if there is no router login page which is kiiiiiilling me haha. All of my silly issues would be gone if I could just set a hard static IP for my server 😄
I have a 5G CGNAT ISP router, but distanced myself from it by adding my own full access router connected via a LAN cable to my ISP one and using its wifi instead of the ISP’s wifi. This prevents the ISP router from stealing IP addresses (it can literally do whatever it wants to its IP ranges as long as it feeds internet through the LAN cable), and gives me full control over local network IP addresses (as I also am not provided any login to the ISP router).
Might be an extra NAT, but that kinda becomes moot being behind CGNAT that can’t open external ports anyway.
I used to do something similar by having another router and my main one in bridging mode but this new router from my ISP seems to be idiot proof and won’t let me access the login screen. A factory reset is in my future I think.
What model is the router?
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Do you use ethernet to usb adapter?
Built in wifi on the mobo
Wifi is not for critical services, get that thing wired.
I use eth, and random disconnects still happen. Switched to an SSD from an SD card, and it’s a bit more reliable now.
Yeah…wifi.
Good luck!
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I have up on Pihole a long time ago because of constant issues. Went with self hosted AdGuard and haven’t had a single issue since.
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Simple: Privacy. The DNS Server of you choosing sees every single domain you are visiting.
Having a own DNS Server allows you to hide varies queries from big DNS providers.
Additional you gain shorter latencies for cached request if you have set it up right.
AND when you have local services you probably have a horizon splitting DNS anyway so setting up a pihole vs something like DNSmasq is not much hassle anyway.
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Which is why NextDNS allows you to decide if DNS requests get logged or not, for how long, on which country, and with encryption.
You have to trust that statement and company since you can’t verify it.
Hardly relevant nowadays.
With the hundreds of DNS requests that a modern websites requires, it is more relevant then ever. For browsing DNS latency is for more important then dowload or upload speed.
Sir, this is the @selfhosted community.
I mean, it’s SelfHosted afterall.
Well in my case it’s due to me just not knowing that this other stuff exists and primarily wanting to Adblock with a piece of software that’s well known and well documented as I’m very noob at self hosting and networking 😛 I’ll have to take a look at those other services you’ve mentioned.
Just fyi so you can hate me more, I’m running Pihole on Windows using WSL.
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All good I appreciate all the help and advice from the community here, even if some are politely telling me I’m an idiot lmao. Comes with technical communities so downvotes and the like don’t phase me (considering you can make a post, downvote yourself, then reliably start a downvote train even if there’s nothing wrong with the comment).
Its literally a single docker compose up command and one time log in to your router and changing the DNS.
You act like its some crazy complicated thing lol
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Can I add custom DNS forwarding rules to NextDNS? Because I need that for my internal network.
