Setting up Pi-hole

A quick note for those that run pihole from an Ubuntu VM, the minimum Ubuntu version that pihole now supports is 20.04 - just had to upgrade a couple of 18.04 VM instances which I and a friend host.
 
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Woke up this morning to find my computer couldn't get online. It had an IP address starting 169.254.x.x. I could get online with my phone once I turned the Wifi off and found there was no VM issues in my area. I was just about able to check my VM hub hadn't re-enabled its DHCP before I lost connection to that. I'd managed to set up a manual IP address for a computer I have downstairs next to the router but then lost connection.

I ended up switching the VM hub off twice and on the second time, with my Pi-Hole not connected to the router, the VM hub worked, had network and Internet access. I was then able to get into the P-Hole to find over 700 errors for this message, "not giving name HOSTNAME to the DHCP lease of ADDRESS because the name exists in SOURCE with address CACHE_ADDR".

I saw that my Pi-Hole DHCP was set to use IP addresses 192.168.0.200 upwards whereas my VM hub was going from 192.168.0.10 so I wonder if the devices couldn't be transferred from their usual range on the VM hub to the 192.168.0.200-251 in the middle of the night? Anyway I have now given my devices a static DHCP lease which I hope will prevent this issue coming back again.
 
That's what I did. Turned DHCP on the VM hub off then activated DHCP on the Pi-Hole. If I could find the logs I could double check the error message and research what caused them but only my Pi-Hole was running the DHCP.
 
Ah right, I misread. Client DHCP behaviour is a funny thing at times, depending on OS, some refuse to get a new address until you do a release/renew.
 
ChrisD. said:
Ah right, I misread. Client DHCP behaviour is a funny thing at times, depending on OS, some refuse to get a new address until you do a release/renew.
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Sorry if I didn't make it clear. I signed into my VM Hub and had the DHCP page open then the same on the Pi-Hole. Turned DHCP off on VM Hub, saved and signed out. Went to Pi-Hole, turned DHCP on and saved. Bit of a learning curve but hopefully now I've told the Pi-Hole to use from 192.168.0.10 upwards instead of from .200 upwards and giving my network devices a static DHCP lease will prevent it from happening again.
 
I used to have a list for Samsung TVs which worked perfectly, unfortunately it's dead now but you have nothing to lose from trying it.
 
Hi Feek. Yep I thought when I have a few hours spare I can try the list and see how it works. I don't suppose you've still got your Samsung TV list by any chance?
 
haveaniceday said:
Did you manage to get this up and running fine on your pi?
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Not yet, haven't had time to be in front of the TV to test it.
Rainmaker said:
Just use the Perflyst/DandelionSprout Smart-TV Blocklist. It's updated and works, and includes domains for all common SmartTV shenanigans.

PiHole (domain format)
AdGuard Home etc (AdBlock Plus syntax format)
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Will give that a go sometime. Thanks.
 
haveaniceday said:
Any news if you managed to get Samsung TV blocked list up & running on pi-hole? Is it effective enough to block ads but still manage to update apps? Cheers

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No, I just used the Perflyst/DandelionSprout Smart-TV Blocklist as suggested by Rainmaker. Haven't really checked for ads but will try to tomorrow.
 
Just updated my pihole......

403 Forbidden​

Oh dear!
ls -l
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 21 11:00 conf-available
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan 21 11:00 conf-enabled
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Feb 14 2022 external.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2959 Jan 21 11:00 lighttpd.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5679 Dec 1 20:32 lighttpd.conf.orig

edit:this...
WooT
 
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New to SBC's. Not techy at all but just got an orange pi zero 2 to run pihole. Blocking about 1500 queries a day :D.
 
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