Two posts back I documented my attempt to reuse an old Raspberry Pi to run Pi-Hole. It didn’t turn into the roaring success I’d hoped it would. The Pi booted and started Pi-Hole well enough, but it was during testing that the Pi-Hole went sideways on me.

Using the fixed IP address I’d assigned to the RPi/Pi-Hole system, I changed my WiFi router to use that address as my primary DNS address, leaving the secondary at 8.8.8.8. I then went to another system and brought up Chrome with Adblock Plus and turned it off on a few pages that I knew were running ads. When I refreshed those pages the ads were still gone off the pages.

I then went back to look at the Pi-Hole dashboard running on one of my Macs in Vivaldi. When I hit refresh on the page to see the latest stats the page, or should I say, the site, froze. It would never come back. I checked the Pi and it was still doing just fine at the prompt (I’d used raspi_config to have it come up at a text prompt, not the graphical desktop, to save memory usage). So then I rebooted the Pi. When it came back up I reloaded the Pi-Hole dashboard and I got the following:

It looked like it was working until I somehow managed to lock up its built-in web server for the dashboard.

Oh well. I felt the probability of failure with that refurbished Raspberry Pi was high enough. My next step will be to take one of my Raspberry Pi 4’s (either the 2GiB or 4GiB) I have mounted in Flirc cases and do a clean install of Raspberry Pi OS (bullseye), purge CommMan, and then install Pi-Hole. A clean setup from start to finish. Then I’ll try this all again.