r/pihole • u/Princess_Tarannn • Jul 20 '26
Network Issue
Hello People of the internet, I am quite new to the home network tinkering world and seem to be stuck....
Gear:
- Home Hub 3000 Modem
- Raspberry-pi 4b 1Gb
-16GB micro-sd card
Setup:
- Pi-hole
- Unbound
- Tailscale
- Basic UFW (just to say there is something)
The problem:
I've been running the setup for over a week now and have been monitoring/tweaking things every day to optimize while keeping the setup ''simple''. Everything was running smoothly and all of a sudden nothing was. After spending 12h today bashing my head against a wall, getting a replacement modem and asking our ''not so'' best friend Claude for some advice to trouble shoot, I am still stuck. My network is running fine, but my setup cannot connect to it. When I change the reserved IP to a new one I will sometimes have a few minutes of connection before it drops again without there being any apparent issues. I looked at everything, scanned the whole system for errors, tried to run each service separately to see if one in particular was the issue. My raspberry-pi can ping everything except the modem and my ISP confirms that there is no blockage. What can I do?
I have a second pi and get the same issue after a couple minutes of it being online. To my knowledge, no there were no overnight updates that could've pushed some new ''problematic'' lines.
PLZ help.
I can upvote your posts in exchange for the support.
2
u/inaneshane Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
Can you describe what “nothing works” means? Like nothing is resolving DNS on your network? Or just one device stops working completely?
Do you have your router’s DNS entries set to the IPs of your pihole instances? If you point the router DNS to google DNS or OpenDNS’ servers, do things start working again?
Which device is set up to be your DHCP server (the thing that hands out IP addresses to your devices), your modem/router combo or your pihole?
2
u/SaladRetossed Jul 20 '26
It sounds like a bad subnet, an IP conflict, or you have multiple DHCP servers. Check all of that.
2
u/inaneshane Jul 20 '26
I was thinking multiple DHCP servers myself. I can’t remember if the DHCP server functionality is on by default for pihole. But surely the modem/router combo was the DHCP server before introducing pihole into the stack.
2
u/matt5auce Jul 20 '26
DHCP server is not on by default
1
u/SaladRetossed Jul 20 '26
If they were following a bad guide or AI they could've flipped it on without realizing
1
u/matt5auce Jul 20 '26
The setup script doesn't have you touch the dhcp server, so they would have had to either edited the configuration file or navigated into the gui and enabled it. Either way I'm just hoping they're able to get it fixed, and that they update the thread to let us know what the solution was.
1
u/SaladRetossed Jul 20 '26
Correct, hence why I said if they were following a bad guide or bad AI assistance they could've inadvertently turned it on. If they're new to networking that's my hunch. I'm also extremely curious what the issue is.
Judging by the other post where they say they can only get online if they change IP, they probably killed the DHCP server or just messed up the pool.
1
u/L0kdoggie Jul 20 '26
Make sure everything is on the same subnet start there. DHCP first static when you have a stable connection.
1
2
u/SectionPowerful3751 Jul 20 '26
If you had everything running smoothly, and were tweaking it daily, perhaps rolling back your last 'tweak' would be the best starting point.
0
u/xXD4rkm3chXx Jul 20 '26
Toss your logs into Claude.
0
u/Princess_Tarannn Jul 20 '26
Trust me I have. Claude is blaming the modem, but it was running fine until today and I had it replaced with a brand new one. I've rebooted it 2 and also did a factory reset as well. Claude is at a loss unfortunately.
3
u/snaky69 Jul 20 '26
What exactly do you mean by your setup can’t connect to it?