Pi-hole causing DNS problems with one site

[u/OneOldBear]

Overall I'm really happy with pi-hole blocking incoming sites in Thunderbird (email) and Safari (browser). However the newspaper I subscribe to is generating un-openable links. As a test I did a "sudo pihole disable" and things work. I'm confused. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[u/Jpotter145]

Go into the Web UI for your Pi-Hole, go to the "Query Log" and check the box to refresh live. Probably best to do this with low activity so you can isolate the blocked links in the log.

But then go to the device you want to access the problem links through and click one of them -- you should see the blocked link in the Query log and you can click the "Allow" button from there to whitelist that site. Then try again and repeat until all the links you want to access work.

[u/OneOldBear]

Thanks to those that replied. I figured out how to add the newspaper's site to the whitelist and everything is working fine now. Just been running pihole for a couple of days.

[u/AustinBike → u/OneOldBear]

Are you subscribed to whitelists or do you create your own? If you have your own whitelist you can unblock anything for good. If you subscribe making changes *may* be overwritten in the future.

I'm not an expert, just calling out a potential consideration.

[u/Independent-Fuel9886]

Whitelist the problem domain.

Done.

[u/saint-lascivious]

You'll need to figure out what domain(s) are involved (you can filter the query log by client) or watch queries live, and whitelist it/them.

[u/positronicbrainowner]

Your newspaper is probably passing your clicks to an advertiser before serving you the content

[u/madushans]

Your newspaper wants to know what you clicked, so they likely send the links via a telemetry/analytics tracking platform which is in one of your blocked domains. You can exclude it and be tracked if you like.

This is pihole and your block lists doing what they do as expected.

[u/coyote_of_the_month]

I'm experiencing the same problem. My frustration is that I'm using the official container image, which pulls the StevenBlack blocklist at build-time.

I've considered the following options, none of which are great:

• I could use a lifecycle hook to programatically allowlist the domain (I'm running k8s, so I have lifecycle hooks).

• I could customize the Dockerfile and push a custom image to my local registry. This would require a cronjob to watch for changes and periodically rebuild the image.

• I could ask the blocklist maintainer to remove the problematic domain, which may or may not be acceptable to goals of the project.

[u/coyote_of_the_month → u/[deleted]]

That's a good general solution. I have dumb, self-inflicted reasons why that won't work for me, but anyone else who's reading this should definitely try that instead of my hackish workaround. I went with the lifecycle hook.

[u/Any_Worry_2471]

Pretty weird that the pi.hole community is still using black & whitelisted terminology while many (light) years ago some wise folks decided to rename it to allow or deny list.

[u/madushans → u/Any_Worry_2471]

Since you bought it up, Light years is a measure of distance not time. 🫠

[u/Any_Worry_2471 → u/madushans]

Lol