6d ago

What is Debian missing to install pihole?

I've installed it on Ubuntu and Raspberry Pi but when I went to my friend's house today to install it on his Debian 12 laptop I couldn't get it to work. It might have just been general networking problems but is Debian shipped without a package that's needed for pihole?

The result of my attempt was strange- dig showed the computer was using 127.0.0.1#53 for DNS resolver, the pihole dashboard in the browser showed the queries, but Firefox kept saying it can't find the page. It was kind of embarrassing since I talked up pihole a lot and couldn't get it to work lol.

5 comments

Does the system have a firewall enabled that is blocking the traffic?
Did the dig result actually return an ip address for the dns query you tried?
Are you able to ping things on the internet from the terminal by IP and hostname (i.e. 8.8.8.8 and google.com)?
- Yes! It has a firewall! :D
  Turning it off yielded the same results :(
  Ping works only by IP address. Pinging a hostname gives me Temporary failure in name resolution
  Dig gives me SERVFAIL but at least it's using the right DNS resolver (the pihole installed on the same computer)
  
  ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.102#53(192.168.1.102) (UDP)
  and pihole.log is full of
  
  query[A] github.com from 192.168.1.102 2025-08-xxx forwarded github.com to 127.0.0.1#5335 2025-08-xxx forwarded github.com to 127.0.0.1#5335 2025-08-xxx reply error is SERVFAIL
  Trying to update gravity on the pihole browser dashboard (which at least works) gives me
  
  try to update gravity [✗] DNS resolution is currently unavailable [i] Waiting up to 120 seconds for DNS resolution............
  But I wonder what it means that all queries are coming from a client named pihole. On other installations it just shows the client as their local IP address.
  
  Client: pi.hole 192.168.1.102 Query Status: Forwarded, reply from 127.0.0.1#5335 Reply: SERVFAIL
  Thanks for your help!
Maybe Firefox was configured for DoH. Then it wouldn't use the OSs DNS settings.
- No, it wasn't that :/
  The other thing that's strange is that it all queries are coming from the client pihole:
  
  Client: pi.hole <local IP address>
  
  Query Status: Forwarded, reply from 127.0.0.1#5335
  
  Reply: SERVFAIL
  The pihole is installed on the same computer that it's supposed to be the DNS resolver for (no access to router). I followed the instructions to the tee when installing pihole + unbound from the pihole website, but for some reason it's not working. All queries get SERVFAIL :/
- Oh yea, excellent point. I'll have to check that out next time, thanks.