Pihole doesn’t work after a week off
I have my pihole running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W connected to my private network. It normally is running all the time, so my router (a rather cheap TPlink thing) is using it as it’s main DNS revolver. Now what happens when you switch off the network, the pi, and everything else when you go for a holiday? Like, say, when you went to visit your family over the Christmas break and switched the homelab off, like I did two weeks ago?
Well, turns out it might not be able to reconnect, especially not when you also use the pi as your local NTP server.
…which in hindsight was a pretty stupid setup causing a problem which I should have seen coming: the pi doesn’t have a real time clock (RTC), when you switch it off it will not be able to reset the time to the actual time, then when it tries to resolve any kind of domain name all of them will have the wrong timestamp. In effect: no DNS resolution possible. Not even to the global NTP servers to synchronize the clock.
Hmm. I guess unless I set those to the actual IP address instead of a domain name.
Anyway just set the date on your pihole to the current time manually, with something like
date -s “5 JAN 2026 21:36:00”
With that it should almost immediately start resolving DNS again and your kid can watch his youtube videos without issues. Or something.
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