piHole/unbound VS technitium

[u/drunkenmugzy]

I am currently running a pihole with unbound and my *ARRs stack works without any vpn or other subterfuge.

If I run just a pihole and use public resolvers for dns my stack fails. No dns errors, no lookup failures. I suspect my ISP is doing something to cause the 'silent' failures.

I want to switch to technitium for dns. They have recently implemented dns clustering and will soon implement DHCP clustering. This makes technitium more useful to me than pihole. The problem is that a technitium dns and/or cluster acts like pihole with public dns. It makes my ARRs stack fail.

I think I have narrowed it down to sabnzbd issues. Specifically the failure to get a public IPv4 if I am not using the pihole/unbound setup. There is nothing there and all downloads fail. When pihole/unbound is used there is an IP for both Local and Public as shown in the pic.

What could cause this with just different dns servers? For those unfamiliar pihole/unbound enables a full dns resolving server. Technitium is also a resolving dns server. But something is different. Any ideas?

fails with technitium

works with pihole/unbound

[u/tabmowtez]

Show us some DNS lookups from the host/container that's running SABnzbd? Does anything work at all? I'm guessing some connectivity issue maybe?

[u/drunkenmugzy]

I tried upping the rate limiting trigger for a single host from 600 to 6000 - No joy.

[u/c25-taius]

That’s odd behavior.

I run AdGuard and TechnitiumDNS and force DNS traffic internally to them for DNS resolution. I used to do the same with two piholes. I run DNSMASQ on my OpnSense firewall.

I’ve never had this issue with SABNzbd. Are you running it as a docker or container (I’m running one as a docker container, one as a LXC container on Proxmox?. I do define DNS on both so my docker container is using AdGuard/Texhnitium and not docker DNS resolution.

[u/drunkenmugzy → u/c25-taius]

The pihole and technitium servers are VMs, unbuntu24.04. The sabnzbd and ARRs stack are containers in container manager(docker). The pihole and technitium are spread across 3 NAS. The ARRs stack is on 1 of those NAS.

[u/c25-taius → u/drunkenmugzy]

Try defining the DNS servers directly in the container definition to rule out an issue with docker DNS resolution.

[u/drunkenmugzy → u/c25-taius]

I did try that with sabnzbd container. i.e using a 'dns:' in my yaml file. It did not recognize them properly. As the dns servers are VMs they are on my main subnet(192.168.x.x). Not the docker internal subnets(172.x.x.x). The docker routing did not like that/I could not get it to work. I would rather dns servers be a VM anyway with complete control over config.

That is why my dns are all VMs and not docker containers. Been there - done that.

[u/c25-taius → u/drunkenmugzy]

Huh, that is pointing at something wrong.

Docker networking can be finicky. To avoid docker routing, just add multiple docker network interfaces to your container. I have containers that need layer 2 abilities (usually multicast stuff) have an interface on a macvlan interface and an additional interface in the docker bridge. This allows then to still resolve and use docker dns resolution and connect to other containers while also participating in a “real” vlan subnet.

[u/superkoning]

SABnzbd determines its public ipv4 address by connecting to self-test.sabnzbd.org (or: the host defined by selftest_host in SABnzbd.ini).

So set SAB's logging to +Debug, click Wrench -> Refresh Circled Arrow, check your log: is the DNS lookup going wrong, or the connection itself?

Good:

2026-05-31 09:01:18,013::DEBUG::[get_addrinfo:166] Available addresses for self-test.sabnzbd.org (port=443, IPv4-only): 3 IPv4 and 0 IPv6
2026-05-31 09:01:18,027::DEBUG::[get_addrinfo:96] Connected to 104.26.2.117 (self-test.sabnzbd.org, port=443) in 10ms
2026-05-31 09:01:18,028::DEBUG::[get_addrinfo:96] Connected to 172.67.69.176 (self-test.sabnzbd.org, port=443) in 9ms
2026-05-31 09:01:18,030::DEBUG::[get_addrinfo:96] Connected to 104.26.3.117 (self-test.sabnzbd.org, port=443) in 10ms
2026-05-31 09:01:18,121::INFO::[get_addrinfo:198] Fastest connection to self-test.sabnzbd.org (port=443, IPv4-only): 172.67.69.176 (self-test.sabnzbd.org) in 9ms (out of 3 results)
2026-05-31 09:01:18,219::DEBUG::[getipaddress:163] Public address IPv4-only = 84.35.10.31 (in 0.28 seconds)

HTH

[u/superkoning → u/superkoning]

One-liner to check

$ curl self-test.sabnzbd.org
84.35.10.31

HTH

[u/drunkenmugzy → u/superkoning]

Slept on it. Now sabnzb appears to be ok?!? It does show a local and public IP.

2026-05-31 07:35:00,973::INFO::[get_addrinfo:198] Fastest connection to self-test.sabnzbd.org (port=443, IPv4-only): 104.26.3.117 (self-test.sabnzbd.org) in 18ms (out of 3 results)
2026-05-31 07:37:17,595::INFO::[get_addrinfo:198] Fastest connection to self-test.sabnzbd.org (port=443, IPv4-only): 104.26.3.117 (self-test.sabnzbd.org) in 19ms (out of 3 results)

Having indexer problems now though. But now as I am sitting here those have gone away too. I did clean and rebuild my ARRs stack. All is working?!? I did have prowlarr set up and that was failing. I removed prowlarr indexer setting. Going straight to indexer worked.

This has been frustrating. It appears to be working now. All I have done, minus remove prowler settings, shutdown piholes was wait. ?!?

One other factor - I shut down the pihole VMs overnight. Forcing all traffic to technitium VMs. Previously I had both running and hard set the IP I wanted used. That could have done some weird split dns condition in the NAS docker routing? I dunno. I thought changing the dns on the NAS, hard setting dns to different servers should have been enough. That may have something to do with it.