I have an asus router with a pi-hole on the network.
I was doing some work on my server and noticed that when pi-hole was down, I couldn’t access the internet. I was looking for some ideas online how to deal with this, but they said to have a second pihole on the network in case one is offline. Is that the only way to do it? Is there any way to have the network go back to normal if the pihole is offline?
I have Pihole in a Proxmox LXC Container that does just that. Just Pihole. It is set to automatically restart.
All for that Reason that you just named.
I use Nextdns for this reason. DNS is critical for Wife Acceptance Factor
Does it work if you change your DNS server by editing /etc/resolv.conf and having it show exactly one name server like
nameserver 9.9.9.9
?
You mentioned you have an Asus router. Which one? Why not move to hosting your stuff on the router? https://www.snbforums.com/forums/asuswrt-merlin.42/ Sure it doesn’t completely solve the issue but in my experience it’s incredibly stable, and more so people expect to restart the router if the Internet isn’t working which simplifies things too. Also beneficial is that you can give different clients different DNS servers comfortably.
Specifically, check out https://diversion.ch/ for dns blocking but its capable of a lot more.
ssh into your pi-hole if possible and try using commands systemctl status pihole-FTL Check the status, and if its disabled use the same command but with start instead of status. Also if this this your first time setup, double check that everything you did is correct, like the DNS setting on router, if the devices get the right DNS etc.
