Setting up Pi-hole

Rainmaker

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Feek said:
@Rainmaker Well nothing amiss noticed today, I ended up using next level down from the one you suggested, the 'Multi PRO' list simply because the next level up says it may introduce some false positives.

Multi PRO - Extended protection (Recommended)​

Big broom - Cleans the Internet and protects your privacy! Blocks Ads, Affiliate, Tracking, Metrics, Telemetry, Phishing, Malware, Scam, Fake, Coins and other "Crap".

Using this link for the actual list, the ABP format version.
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Glad you didn't encounter any issues. I'd suggest you give my recommendation a try (Pro++) for 24 hours now, and see how you fare. It has many extra perks (including a tamed down 1Hosts Pro list, versus 1Hosts Lite in the one you tried). All Hagezi lists get the same whitelist treatment; the FPs should be broadly similar across them, so if Pro was OK for you then Pro++ shouldn't be any worse.

I've been using Pro++ for a family of 6 (including a social media and Internet shopping addicted wife, and kids who live on mobile games), for about six months now, and the last FP was in December (and fixed within 10 minutes by Gerd). As I said, we worked hard on squashing FPs for tech and British users for a couple of months last year, and you shouldn't have any issues with it at all. Even Ultimate is quite usable now (but definitely not set and forget, unlike Pro and Pro++).

Either way, they're great lists and even Pro will do you fine (and still better than vanilla OISD). I'd appreciate your feedback if you do try the Pro++ for a day, however.
 
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MarcLister

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Got a weird issue with my Pi-Hole. It started on Thursday evening around 9.30pm then a similar time last night. I went out earlier this afternoon and got home around 2.30pm. The issue was present then. It seems the Pi-Hole stops working as none of my computers connected to the network can get online. They have sporadic connectivity and when I run the Windows network troubleshooter it says the DNS server isn't responding. The Raspberry Pi is powered on and the network lights on both the Pi and the corresponding port on the switch show activity so its almost a "lights are on but no-one's home" kind of situation. Eventually I worked out that if I take the power cable out of the Raspberry Pi and plug it back in the network comes back alive after a minute or two, once the Pi/Pi-Hole has botted back up.

So what is happening that only pulling the power out and plugging it back in fixes/temporarily resolves? I can update Gravity OK. The only changes I can thing of is going from VM to Aquiss but I doubt that's the cause. I did accidentally interrupt a Gravity update earlier in the week by closing the browser tab by mistake but how would that affect the DNS? Also the fact I can sign into the Pi-Hole admin console and that my Internet access is absolutely fine apart from these brief outages. The fact that I immediately repeated the Gravity update and it completed OK surely means I didn't bork the whole install?

What logs do I need to check to see if I can spot anything around the time of the outages that might explain this?
 

Feek

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I had an incident last week where I did a manual gravity update and it crashed the Pi to the point that the only way to restart it was to pull the power.

There was an update yesterday.

"Fix for gravity's unchecked resource consumption."

I wonder if that was related to your issue as well, @MarcLister
 

MarcLister

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Hi Feek. Hmm similar to me then but I stupidly closed the Pi-Hole tab by accident during a manual gravity update. It seemed to complete OK and I started another one to make sure. Seeing as my Internet browsing was unaffected I thought I'd not screwed stuff up. Then when I had the outages and everything else was OK I wondered if it was something that took a while to appear.

I saw the update mentioned in Pi-Hole's Twitter or Reddit so ran the update. I didn't see the changelist mention of the unchecked resource completion but I've not had a problem since I did the Pi-Hole update yesterday. Fingers crossed!
 

Feek

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Rainmaker said:
Either way, they're great lists and even Pro will do you fine (and still better than vanilla OISD). I'd appreciate your feedback if you do try the Pro++ for a day, however.
Click to expand...
events.gfe.nvidia.com

Is a false positive in the Pro++ list. It's blocking updates and game configuration via the GeForce Experience.
 

Rainmaker

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Feek said:
events.gfe.nvidia.com

Is a false positive in the Pro++ list. It's blocking updates and game configuration via the GeForce Experience.
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I've been blocking that for years, but I don't use GFE. I'll report it for you now, it should be removed within a few hours tops. :)

Edit: Issue opened for you @Feek. Kindly whitelist it for now and it should be fixed before your next gravity update.

Edit2: Fixed within 2 mins. Told you he was responsive haha. It will work fine after the next list update.
 
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Rainmaker

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Feek said:
Thanks but I've gone back to the Multi PRO list. I've found half a dozen Microsoft links this afternoon that were stopping things. It's just too much.
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Interesting. We have three Windows boxes here (Windows 10 and 11) and I haven't seen any issues in 6 months. If you can share them or the relevant parts of your logs, that would be helpful. I understand if you cba.
 

Rainmaker

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Feek said:
Various xxx.events.data.microsoft.com ones, I don't have a note of them, but I do remember one was teams.events.data.microsoft.com
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The *events.data.microsoft.com URLs are mostly telemetry URLs and should generally be safe to block. Some are required, however, and that particular one is actually on Hagezi's white list. It shouldn't then, it seems, have made it to the main block list. I'll dig into it some more and have a chat with Gerd about it.

I'm happy the Pro is working for you at any rate, it's more than sufficient for a home network so whatever works best for you! :)

Edit: Actually, Gerd has a separate whitelist which is regularly updated. Does PiHole have whitelist (as well as blocklist) functionality, as AGH does? If so you can add his whitelist, and it stops lists blocking things known to break functionality... Your Teams URL is on that list, so it may be handy to add to your config for future peace of mind.
 
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Ad_Augendae

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Feek said:
Thanks but I've gone back to the Multi PRO list. I've found half a dozen Microsoft links this afternoon that were stopping things. It's just too much.
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@Feek Just noticed this, how you getting on with the Multi Pro list, I have a pile of white lists which I need to leave alone so the big list++ adding this 'n' that isn't going to work for me.
 

Rainmaker

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Feek said:
I've had no issues with the Multi Pro list but if I'm reading it correctly. it looks like the oisd list isn't included in the Multi Pro list, only from the Pro++ upwards.

So I've added it as a second list.

Click to expand...

Multi (the list before Pro) includes oisd.domains.txt. Pro contains multi.txt plus extra sources... It's in there. :) Up until Pro++ each list contains the sources of each list before it.

Edit: For (a bit of) clarity, Gerd does it somewhat like this:

Light (basic sources + whitelist)
Multi (Light + extra sources + whitelist)
Pro (Light +Multi + extra sources + whitelist)
---
Pro++ (all sources from scratch + extra sources + less aggressive whitelist)
Ultimate (all sources from scratch + extra sources + even more sources + little whitelist?)

The Pro++ and Ultimate stand alone and are more aggressive and take privacy first. Light through Pro build on each other.
 
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Feek

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If it's included, why does adding it as a second list increase the number of blocked domains shown in Pihole by over 100,000?

/edit - I can only assume that oisd.domains.txt isn't the same as the big oisd list so adding it as a second list seems sensible.
 
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Rainmaker

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Feek said:
If it's included, why does adding it as a second list increase the number of blocked domains shown in Pihole by over 100,000?

/edit - I can only assume that oisd.domains.txt isn't the same as the big oisd list.
Click to expand...
I pressed reply/quote and saw your edit... That would have been my thought too. Since OISD is itself only a mix of upstream blocklists, I assume Gerd decided to do it that way. For example, one of OISD's main source lists is Stephen Black which is already included in Gerd's list (and Pro adds 1Hosts which is excellent in itself). Best thing would be to ask him, but even just running 1Hosts Lite you'll block pretty much every nasty going. Running Pro (1Hosts lite, AdGuard DNS, OISD domains, Stephen Black, notracking etc) I haven't seen a single bad domain get through in my own network - and I do check!
 
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