Rubin Shrestha
Rubin Shrestha
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If my network goes down, I have to restart my PiHole to get it back?

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I installed PiHole a few months ago. Under normal operation, everything’s running fine but I’ve noticed that when my home internet goes down (power outage, plumber cuts a cable, etc) then my internet will continue to appear down even after it’s restored and will continue to behave as if it’s down until I restart the PiHole docker container. I would like my internet to return to normal ASAP.

I’m running PiHole in docker on MintBox Mini 2. I start it with the following docker-compose.yml:

version: "3"

services:
  pihole:
    container_name: pihole
    image: pihole/pihole:latest
    ports:
      - "53:53/tcp"
      - "53:53/udp"
      - "67:67/udp"
      - "80:80/tcp"
    environment:
      TZ: '[my time zone]'
      WEBPASSWORD: '[my password]'
    volumes:
      - './etc-pihole:/etc/pihole'
      - './etc-dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d'
    cap_add:
      - NET_ADMIN
    restart: unless-stopped

This server has a fixed internal IP.

I’m using Google’s Nest Wifi Router (the older version with sharper edges). I have the DNS configured as follows:

Primary server: 192.168.[the static, internal IP of the mintbox running pihole]
Secondary server: 8.8.8.8
Primary IPV6 server: 2001:4860:4860::8888
Secondary IPV6 server: 2606:4700:4700::1111

I don’t believe I have IPv6 configured on my network or I’d point the Primary IPV6 address to my internal PiHole server but oh well. If PiHole isn’t working for whatever reason, I would expect any DNS requests to fallback to Google’s 8.8.8.8 DNS or CloudFlare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS.

Now the scenario: If I lose internet to my house because of an external reason, and then later it’s restored, every device on the network will act as if all external-facing requests can’t be completed. But if I then go to my mintbox and restart the docker container then everything manages to connect like normal. I would rather fallback to a network not protected by pihole than to not have a working network at all.

From what I can tell, this doesn’t affect other PiHole users the same way, their network picks back up normally when connectivity is returned. What can I do to get that behavior?

Other than adding a few lists and whitelisting a domain or 2, my pihole is configured to defaults.

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