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.
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.
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).
Just fyi you can install pihole on a barebones Debian system too. Mine is running in a Debian 11 vm on my threadeipper proxmox hypervisor. Only gave it 2 cores and 2gb ram and it’s basically transparent to my devices, performance wise. DNS is very light.
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.
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.
Clue in name.
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.