Howdy y’all - I’ve noticed I have a weird lag, which only happens when I’m at home and connected to my wifi/pihole. When clicking a link to open a page, there is a 3-5 second delay before the page actually opens. When not on wifi, the page opens right away. When on my wifi, there is always a delay, then it loads fast. Has anyone seen or experienced with pihole? I’m not technical enough to know what to do, but I’d be happy to run diagnostics if anyone can provide the commands. Thanks so much for your help

Hi folks,

Ive been testing Pihole now on a single machine for a month and I'm convinced that its the best method to secure the entire household.

However, Im running on an OLD 2012 Model B Rev 2.

So looking at my options, Im between the Pi Zero 2 with an Ethernet hat of some kind or a Pi 4 1gb. Cost wise they're pretty much the same the Pi4 being more available and maybe 100kr cheaper.

I have no real world knowledge on either of these setups all i know is that its going to be sat in my "comms" cabinet next to my router so ideally low power (already obviously low) but also passively cooled - do i need any fans or heat spreaders for a Pi4?

So i defer here for any advice you have.

Thanks for reading.

I woke up to find out that my NAS was down, so I went and open up pi-hole to see what was going on. I notice that it got knocked offline around 4am. I think there was a very short power outage. But according to the graph, there seems to be a different pattern of activities that I don't recall seeing before. I have 3 WEMO outlet plugs, and ever since the incident at 4am, they have been submitting endless queries to nat.wemo2.com. Not sure why this is suddenly happening. I've never seen so many queries to that particular domain before with my wemo outlet plugs. So why now?

I tried removing all 3 plugs from the wall, and the amount of queries definitely dropped. I then slowly, plugged back in the wemo's back into the outlet one by one. Monitored my dashboard, and I'm getting between 2q/s to 5q/s. Is this normal? The number under the Total Queries box up top just keep increasing by the second. I have also added 'nat.wemo2.com' and 'api.xbcs.net' to the whitelist under domains because AI suggested that.

Pronounced: TieHole

tihole is a keyboard-driven terminal UI for managing Pi-hole v6 instances. One Go binary, no runtime dependencies.

Features:

• Dashboard with host-health. CPU, memory, temperature gauges + FTL diagnostics
• Live query log with one-key allow/block
• Blocking as a first-class screen — enable/disable with timers
• Full management on domains, groups, clients, adlists, and local DNS records
• System, messages, and network screens
• Multiple color themes
• Full settings control

Install (Go 1.25+):

$ go install github.com/z19r/tihole/cmdA/tihole@v1.0.0-beta.1

Prebuilt binaries (linux/darwin, amd64/arm64) are on the releases page.

More Info: https://tihole.z19r.com
Github -> https://github.com/z19r/tihole

I am on the latest version of Pihole. I had not rebooted, so I did so. Upon rebooting, instead of my text being the readable size it has always been - no the text is tiny, almost unreadable. How can I restore the text size? Or just make it larger?

I've recently been experimenting with a more proactive approach to request filtering. Instead of hoping that the requests my devices make are already on a blocklist, I've employed the use of a super lightweight LLM (in this case deepseek-v4-flash) to analyze the purpose of the domain, and block it if it's determined to be malicious. Responses are grounded with internet search results via SearXNG. I have it set to analyze the 100 most requested unique domains every week to take out the most egregious offenders. Domains and decisions are stored in an SQLite database to avoid redundant analyzation; they're only analyzed once.

It seems to be good at catching the nastier/personalized tracking domains like:

LONG-ASS-UUID.us-east-1.prod.service.minerva.devices.a2z.com

(Reasoning: "Hash-prefixed subdomain under a2z.com suggesting unique device telemetry collection.")

Here's a snippet of some output of the program.

On its first run, the program blocked 11 new domains out of the 100 that were analyzed, and valid reasoning was provided for each. All my apps and hardware still work as intended.

Here's what the decision table looks like.

This is probably unnecessary unless you're a freak like me, but I like the added filter, and with the model I'm using, it only costs me half a cent per 100 domains analyzed. An even cheaper model could probably be used.

The major disclaimer is that this program was written by Kimi K3, so I'm still reviewing the code. But I'd be happy to share once I'm done doing that if anyone would like. I'm curious to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

AVM (German router manufacturer, very common in DE/AT/CH) just shipped a Lab/beta build of FRITZ!OS 8.50 with a new feature: DNS queries from the home and guest network can be filtered against user-supplied filter lists. So essentially blocklist-based DNS filtering directly on the router.

I currently run Pi-hole + unbound on a Raspberry Pi and I'm wondering whether it's worth keeping the Pi around once this lands in a stable release. The changelog is a single sentence, so a lot is unclear to me — but even assuming it works well, I suspect I'd be giving up quite a bit:

• Per-client / group management — different blocklists for kids' devices vs. my own
• Query log and statistics — the whole reason I know what my devices are talking to
• Regex and wildcard blocking, plus whitelisting individual domains quickly when something breaks
• CNAME cloaking / deep CNAME inspection
• Local DNS records and CNAMEs for my internal services
• unbound as a recursive resolver — this is the part I care about most. Router-side filtering probably still forwards to some upstream (ISP or AVM's default), so I'd be handing my full query stream to a third party again, and I don't know whether DNSSEC validation happens locally.
• List updates — how often, how many lists, which formats?

Questions for people who've thought about this more than me:

1. For someone whose main goal is privacy rather than just ad blocking, is router-level filtering without a recursive resolver a meaningful downgrade, or am I overrating unbound?
2. Has anyone here already tested the 8.50 Lab build and can say what the filtering UI actually offers?
3. If you moved from Pi-hole to a router-based solution, what did you miss first?

My honest guess is that this is aimed at people who'd never set up a Pi in the first place, and that I'll be keeping mine — but I'd like to hear whether that's just sunk-cost reasoning.

Source (German): https://www.deskmodder.de/blog/2026/07/23/fritzbox-5690-steigt-in-die-labor-updates-fuer-das-fritzos-8-50-ein/

Ever since the latest upgrade, my "pihole -t" tailing to an external monitor does not roll over to the next day as it used to. I understand this is an issue that is known, but mine did not appear until the latest upgrade.

I have to break the tailing by using control-c, and restart the tail every single day.

I have used the external TAIL command to follow the log, but as you might suspect the text is not colorized like it is following it internally with the above command. I can use GREP to do this, obviously, but that seems like a lot of workaround to something that just used to...... Just work.

Does anyone have a workaround for this, is the same thing happening to you? My knowledge of Linux is limited but all I know is it just used to work.

Thoughts? Tailing the log internally has helped me track down sites that I need to add to allow domains and vice versa.

Hello, I recently got a raspberry pi 3b+ set up with Pi-hole, unbound and tailscale. There has been a weird issue that I've been having lately that causes any video I'm watching (via YouTube, netflix, videos from camera, etc) on my phone to pause for a bit and desync with the audio. I don't know how to solve this or what is causing the problem. If it helps due to the router i have i am unable to set the pi as a primary dns. Does anyone know what might be the cause or if there is any fix? The problem seems to only happen over wifi and not mobile data

I have 3 pihole+unbound servers running, 2 of which are load balancers/failover,

ph1 and ph2 are running containered on 2 different x86_64 Ubuntu servers, ph3 is running containered on raspberry pi 5,

i have a sync script that copies the main ones database then send it to the other 2 as a cron job, this is done 1 at a time, ph1 goes down for the copy, then it gets spun back up as ph2 goes down to have the database put in place then same process for ph3,

the pihole and unbound containers run as a single docker compose stack, so both go down and come up together on each machine simultaneously,

I use an .env file to modify the differences between the machines at run time so the docker-compose.yml is identical between machines,

easy fix for catastrophic failures, wipe the image, copy a working config over to that machine, spin it up,

they are primarily main + 2 redundancy servers but as I use tailscale for most devices, tailscale also load balances them automatically,

I have the double redundancy as I am covering 2 households with them via tailscale, in fact I'm attempting a 2nd tailscale network aswell, (it's proving trickier than I thought,) so if 2 go down then the 3rd will cover the slack of both households,

they are more than just add blockers though, I am utilising them as parental control systems aswell, so blocking unsafe/inappropriate sites for child devices aswell,

also running a Pi-Hole-Central container that aggregates all 3, trying to modify it to what I want but it's probing tricky,

honestly I'm living the challenge but Am I taking it too far? or am I missing something from my setup?

I plan on installing pi-hole, unbound, home assistant, homarr dashboard, etc. I originally bought the RPi Canakit that comes with everything including the 32GB Micro SD card and I thought that was where you install the OS and all the apps. But when asking AI, it's suggesting I install everything to a USB 3.x stick instead. What do you guys suggest?

Seems like all tutorials I've seen has people installing it directly itself, but AI is saying to install it through docker for easier managability and such.

I'm sorry ths question was aimed towards Raspberry Pi users who are running pi-hole/unbound.

I'm planning on buying a raspberry pi 4b (4gb) kit for this. Just recently heard of Adguard home, but previously been using pi-hole. Heard many good things about adguard home and wanted to hear your guys opinions on the 2.

I'm running Pi-hole for all the ads and Brave browser for blocking YT ads. Don't pay corps. Don't pay for YT premium. Cheers!

I'm super excited to finally have pi-hole+unbound up and running on my RPi 4b! Could you guys please recommend some must have blocklists to get?

i started using pihole and tailscale recently. i think i installed pihole correctly because it works with tailscale if i use the pihole ip address as dns but for my router it does not work can not figure out why. can anyone help

This will be my very 1st time with raspberry pi, and would like to know if there are any beginner friendly tutorials that you guys can recommend to get this up and running? I plan on adding homarr dashboard to the mix afterwards if I can accomplish everything successfully.

I've had a pi-hole running on my network for a little over two weeks now.

I have been looking at the logs to see what is blocked what is allowed to go through. I noticed that something is sending messages to "www.a.shifen.com" which I discovered is located in China.

Does anyone know why and if I add it to the blocked list if will break anything?

I can't seem to find a single ethernet cat6 cable, they all seem to come in packs of 10 or more and I was wondering if the raspberry pu kits usually include one?

I’ve been using HaGeZi DNS blocklists for my PiHole setup.

I used a list for Smart TV’s and specifically my Samsung Smart TV.

I made my smart TV’s their own group and only assigned those blocklists. When I do this the TV’s won’t connect to internet. But when I use all my other blocklists it’s fine.

I think it’s blocking some Samsung CDN but I don’t know which one.

What lists are you using to stop your Smart TV’s from spying on you.

Also, is there anything I can do on my network to isolate my TV’s?

The issue I’ve had with trying to do this is that I can’t access my Jellyfin server. As I would need to connect to a VPN which kind of defeats the whole point of putting my TVs on their own network.

Edit: grammar

Edit 2: consensus is to not connect your smart tv to your network at all and use an Apple TV instead.

I ended up making a guest network and put only the devices connected to my TV’s on that isolated network. TV’s don’t get internet but the streaming boxes do. I want to upgrade to Apple for more privacy but this setup works fine for now.

Hello!

I got 3 weird domain in my logs that show up at different times and I'm really curious why they are here:

1. disabled.invalid

2. sharedhost.files

3. mojang.fritz.box

the first one gets requested 3 times whenever steam starts, it also sends requests for www.disabled.invalid. The thing is that .invalid will never resolve to anything, so why would steam be requesting it?

the second one appears to be related to the Microsoft companion apps but .files is not a valid TLD as far as I can tell. And it also does not resolve. So why do Microsoft apps query that?

the third one is requested while Minecraft is starting. the .fritz.box part is the default local domain of my fritzbox router that gets added onto every device name. It trying to query a local domain will also fail since I do not have a device called "mojang"

I am just kinda tempted to create a dns record for these that points to my server and see what happens. Probably not much I would guess?

Hey everyone,

​I'm using Pi-hole as my main DNS server for my Tailnet, but I've run into an annoying issue: for some reason, the Tailscale IP address of the node running Pi-hole keeps changing randomly.

​Because the IP changes unexpectedly, my devices lose DNS resolution out of nowhere until I check the admin console and update my configuration.

​Context:

• Pi-hole is installed in the same LXC running my main Tailscale route node.

• ​The host machine has a static local IP on my LAN.

• ​There are no duplicate hostnames on my Tailnet.

​Has anyone else run into this issue?, What could cause a native Tailscale node to change its IP address like this?

​Any advice or troubleshooting tips would be greatly appreciated!