Custom Adlists (PiHole) no longer working since upgrade to latest version (7.9.3)

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

First of all (and I realise you must get this a lot), love dietpi (it is brilliant), dietpi with pihole is even more amazing.

I customise my pihole a bit… (more blocking goodness!) and one of the things I could do before I went up to dietpi 7.9.3 (new install on a pi3b) was to use my own custom adlists, here is what I did:

  1. Run command: “sudo chown dietpi.users /var/www/html”

  2. put my custom adlist in the html folder using winscp

  3. Put permission back to the way there were using command: “sudo chown root.root /var/www/html”

  4. Then in the pihole interface if my list was called “blockme31122021” I would add an entry such as “http://pi.hole/blockme31122021” under adlists, after a gravity update it would read and add the custom adlist.

But since the update no longer seems to work (the pihole gravity just says list not found plus the number of blocked sites doesn’t go up like it usutally does), I’ve tried putting the file in several places and I’ve googled around but here I am, what am I doing wrong? Is there a better way of doing this?

Thanks in advance, hope my noob-ness hasn’t shone through too much!

2

Why are you changing permission on /var/www/html? This is not needed. You can login using user root on SCP.

Next to this /var/www/html is not the web server root directory on DietPi if you used or install script. We set web server root to /var/www. Therefore your add list to be placed there.

As well blocking page has been removed by PiHole developer some time ago.

3

Thank you for confirming where the file should go (I had tried that area but then again my pihole is acting a little strange still, refusing to update, I will now move on to looking into whether the issue is pihole itself).

Good point about using root, iirc I was following a guide which didn’t advocate logging in as root, but it is a faf lol.

Thank you again.

4

Try to open the file via web browser. There you should be able to open the file. Just to verify if it is working in general.

5

Thank you that’s good advice, I do periodically check it (it is just a simple file with a list of domains I want blocked) to add to it, just checked and it is ok.

I confess it is rather large (around 350MB, I have to open it in notepad++ as notepad just cannot handle it) so I will try using a smaller test file in the location you recommended then if that does not work I will try a fresh install.

6

A 350MB text file. WTF :rofl:

You are blocking the whole internet, isn’t it?

7

Haha lol :rofl: I’m getting close but it is working sooooo well, ads, nasty nasty porn, spyware, trackers, ransomware all blocked - pure filtered internet.

8

we are moving off-topic but personally I’m using a collection of lists provided by https://firebog.net/ :sunglasses:

9

Nice, not to sound cocky but my list includes that (total number of sites is almost 1.6 million) I created it by combining all the blocklists from a pihole using notepad++ (it was born out of need as a lot of the great blocklists were no longer available on the www but were on this old pi).

Back on track, I’ve done some testing and I still cannot get it working as I have in the past so as a sanity test, I wiped both piholes (I’ve got two pi3b’s) and started over with the latest dietpi and the dietpi pihole would not play ball, here’s what I did:

  1. Copied list to the pi3 using root to var/www

  2. Added this entry as an adlist on the pihole adpage - http://pi.hole/CustomBL_18082021 (works and even when I click it, chrome downloads the list)

  3. Refreshed gravity, here’s the result (failure):

_Target: http://pi.hole/CustomBL_18082021
[✓] Status: Retrieval successful
Received empty file
[✗] List download failed: no cached list available



Thinking it maybe an issue with the list I made a test blocklist with just one entry and pihole running on dietpi did not like it either:

Target: http://pi.hole/CustomBL_18082021_TEST
[✓] Status: Retrieval successful
Received empty file
[✗] List download failed: no cached list available



On the other identical pi I installed the latest raspbian and:
\

  1. Altered permission on the html folder (root is not accessible on this os) and copied list to the pi3 to var/www/html
    \
  2. Added this entry as an adlist on the pihole adpage - http://pi.hole/CustomBL_18082021 (works and even when I click it, chrome downloads the list)
    \
  3. Refreshed gravity, here’s the result (success):

    Target: http://pi.hole/CustomBL_18082021
    [✓] Status: Retrieval successful
    Analyzed 15696997 domains


    Joulinar Thanks for confirming the blocklist location and the right account to use on dietpi, if you need to you can close this for now, I’ve got a third pi I use for testing, when I get a moment I’ll put dietpi and pihole on it and test at my leisure on it (it’ll be easier pihole 1 and 2 get a lot of use lol), if I get anywhere I’ll post back.

    Thanks again, appreciate the quick assistance._
10

could it be the file getting corrupted while transferring it from Windows to DietPi?

For testing, did you tried to add a file that definitely did not exist? Just to verify if the error message is changing.

11

Since the webroot on DietPi is /var/www, the file needs to be added to /var/www/blockme31122021. May this be the reason?