Pi-hole install failing

Troubleshooting
1

Updated to Dietpi 146, uninstalled and reinstalled Pi-hole as there were updates for both according to the web interface.

Pi-hole is not running, in fact I get “no such command” when I type pihole --help

/etc/pihole/ exists, but is empty.

I attempted the install twice with no luck.


Regards

Christian

2

Hi Christian,

Did you both uninstall and then reinstall PiHole from dietpi-software ?

Either way, lets try uninstalling again, we’ll also flag it as installed to ensure uninstall code takes effect:

sed -i "/^aSOFTWARE_INSTALL_STATE\[93\]=/c\aSOFTWARE_INSTALL_STATE\[93\]=2" /DietPi/dietpi/.installed
dietpi-software uninstall 93

Now, reselect for install in dietpi-software, let us know if problems persist as we’ll probably need to manually debug.

3

Uninstalled and installed twice using the gui last night with no go.

Your magic CL incantation worked, pihole installed correctly afterwards.

When checking the help part of pihole, I noticed that there is a command for updating pihole, can that be used in this install?

From ‘pihole --help’ I see the following line:

-up, updatePihole Update Pi-hole components


If that works correctly, I’ll do it that way next time.

Regards

Christian

4

Hi,

Yes, that can be used to upgrade PiHole, however, PiHole will overwrite the system lighttpd.conf (webserver), so you’ll need to back that up before updating:

Please see updating PiHole in:
https://dietpi.com/forum/t/dietpi-software-details-for-all-installation-options/22/23

5

Thanks, everything is back to normal, I put a txt file of the instructions in my backup directory for black/white lists and now lighttpd.conf where it’s handy.

Any idea why the GUI uninstall didn’t work?

Regards

Christian

6

Hi Christian,

Unsure at the moment. I was unable to replicate any issue with install > uninstall > install of PiHole on a fresh test installation.
It may be unique to your current installation and configuration, although, we have no real control over the PiHole installer and their installation script/code may change at any time.

We did have a fork of PiHole in the past, that allowed us to control the installation (and optimize it a little), however, this required constant maintenance to keep it upto date with official PiHole. Now we use the official installer.

7

Hi Christian.

Sometime in the past it will work, but to update to Pi-hole Version v2.13.2 and Web Interface Version v2.5.2 via

pihole -up

I have success for Pi-Hole Core update but AdminLTE will fail …
After this, pihole -up only shows error messages.

So I made a backup via Web-Interface Pi-Hole => Settings => Pi-hole Teleporter, plus l_ighttpd.conf_
Uninstall via dietpi-software menu (please choose “no” for all additional package uninstall) and after this install pihole via dietpi-software menu.
This does the trick, but all settings are gone.
Import backup via Pi-hole Teleporter will not work perfect, so I have to copy the files:

adlists.list
blacklist.txt
setupVars.conf
whitelist.txt
wildcardblocking.txt

by hand back to /etc/pihole/…

8

Yes k-plan, that is what I used to do, uninstall via the gui, then re-install and copy back my configuration files. Oddly enough, the gui method did not work this time, but FourDee’s CL magic did the job and so I have put those instructions in my backup directory, should I need it again.

Thanks for helping me out FourDee, and for taking a look at the reason why, though I suspect it was the ‘bit gods’ who were involved. In fact, it might have been been caused by a wonky internet connection (DSL) as it was raining that night and stuff was going down and coming back up several times an hour, well that or stray cosmic radiation!!! Bell/MTS tech was just by and found a corroded terminal where my service drop comes from. The connector was replaced and things look good now… at least until it rains again….

Regards

Christian

9

No worries.

I remember the day when (sounding old = now lol) I had 512KBit ADSL, at max distance from exchange. If a bird landed on the telephone line, my internet would simply die, gone. I’d sit at the router web interface and wait for the dB’s to raise again, a sync was coming, just had to wait for the bird (yep, boarder line sad lol).
Snow? lets not go there :smiley:

Now, we have 100MBit fiber, and unless the moles dig the fibre up, all good! So glad those days are over lol :slight_smile:

In other words, I feel your pain :frowning:

10

I’m old enough to remember having to use 300 baud acoustic! I used to access the Internet via an old dumb terminal, 1200 baud terminal node controller (ham radio) to the local University and command line was it, finger, telnet etc… no WWW, no GUIs and I remember when I saw Mosaic 1.0 in action after WWW became a thing. :mrgreen:

We are supposedly getting overhead fiber here… talking to the tech, the fiber will go all the way into the house where it gets split into copper for each service. Everything comes into the house over a single pair of twisted right now… Internet, phone and cable TV. I used to get 30Mbit down which changed to 25Mbit to save some money, but 1.8Mbit up is awfully slow….

Christian