I’m about to throw my entire Pihole out the window

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.

Basically, no static IPs at all. Lol

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.

Irrelevant, unless your pihole is running on your DHCP server. Does the server running pihole have a statically assigned IP that is within the DHCP range being assigned to other devices?

Static addresses should be outside of your DHCP range, ideally. If you can’t change the range, and assuming sequential handouts of IPs from your router among other things, you can try setting the server’s static IP to a bigger number.

I have had this issue for about a year, while trying different monitoring and logging solutions to try and find out what's going on.

This was such a bitch! Now I'm spreading the word, so that other won't suffer as long as I have.

Hahaha! I'm keeping this typo 😂

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.

This is the way. Although, to clarify, you should assign static IPs on your DHCP server, which for most SOHO networks, that's going to be your router.

If you assign statics on your hosts, your DHCP server will assign them the preferred address if available, but if it's already assigned then the DHCP server is going to give your device the middle finger and assign them whatever the fuck it wants.

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.

One last piece of advice: Pihole has great support. I've gotten a ton of answers and assistance from the Pihole Sub on Reddit. I don't know if it's still active since the migration away from Reddit, but you may ask.

I ran it on a linux-based NAS as well as a Windows server. I don't use Pihole currently, however.

Down in a reply to some other comments https://lemmy.ca/comment/3915756

I am horrified, but equally impressed 😂

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.

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.

Do you know if your router is acting as a DHCP server? Most do, and if you’ve set up the Pi as one without logging in and turning off your router’s, you’ve set up two conflicting DHCP servers, and that would explain your issues.

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.

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.

Wifi is not for critical services, get that thing wired.

Yeah...wifi.

Good luck!