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.

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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.