Every month or so all my devices lose internet and the only way to connect them all back is to disconnect them from the DNS server that Pihole is running.
I set my Pihole to have a static IP but for some reason after around a month or maybe longer, it just fails. This has happened 4 times over the last while and the only fix is to essentially uninstall everything on my Pihole, disable it, and then reconfigure it from scratch again.
I’m not sure what’s going on so any help would be appreciated.
One of your biggest problems here is what we call high availability (HA). Your critical services should be HA, which means no single points of failure (SPOF). Your DNS services have a SPOF: your one pi-hole server. For any service to be resilient, it needs to be HA. This means full redundancy for all things in the whole stack that provide the service.
For pihole, this means running a pihole instance on two separate devices, with two separate IP addresses. Your dhcp server will send out two DNS servers with every lease. Most DNS clients will use at least two DNS servers.
If one of the servers goes down, your other, redundant pihole server will continue serving DNS.
This is why, contrary to other recommendations in this thread, I run pihole in docker on regular machines. If one of those machines dies, the other machine will continue serving requests, and it’s easy to launch the docker pihole on another machine and reconfigure my DNS server to hand out the new DNS server address.
That’s a good idea that I hadn’t considered. I’ll see if I can get Pihole running on an old android phone I have lying around.
My server and a raspberry are running adguard home
Both have autoupdate with autoreboot. If I need to change something, connect, disconnected, everything will continue working
You should probably also sync them. I use orbital sync for this. https://github.com/mattwebbio/orbital-sync
Or gravity-sync. I use two Pi-holes with gravity-sync and it’s very reliable and effortless.