DNS issues?

[Adcadet]

Very frustrated. Hoping this old gem of the internet can save me.

My two kids both have relatively new PCs, both runs Windows 11. My wife and I run Windows 11 as well. My kids would each, individually, occasionally not be able to connect with Discord, Steam, or other gaming servers. I would flush DNS cache, restart the machine, curse, it would work again magically. Tonight my youngest's machine had this issue, and for the life of me, I can't get things working again. The easiest way for me to tell that the internet connectivity is borked is (not ironically) googling "DNS reddit" and then not being able to follow any of the links. Many other sites don't load as well (e.g. Nvidia). Trying wired, wireless, and USB wireless adapters didn't seem to help. Booting into a copy of Linux Mint live CD (USB) got the same errors. Using Window's reset network feature didn't help, not did a Windows 11 reset (both the shorter and longer versions). I tried turning off Windows defender and antivirus. No help.

I suspect the issue is related to my network setup. My router is a Netgate appliance running pfSense. I have a virtual machine running PiHole. Disabling blocking made no difference. I tried setting the Netgate/pfSense to just use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (under general setup) and 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 under DHCP server/LAN with DNS resolver unchecked and DNS forwarder enabled. No joy.

When I manually set the computer's network card to use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 under IPV4, Reddit loaded a few times before then refusing to work. Putting in the public DNS servers under IPV6 did not help.

Oddly, my other son is playing on his PC just fine the whole time, my PC is fine, and I can reboot my wife's PC and it works fine. No idea why the one PC seems so sensitive to what I suspect is a DNS issue.

I suspect I still have an issue with how I've set up pfSense, but I don't know enough about it. I hope I don't have to go back to using a junk consumer wifi router that just works.

 

[ddrueding]

I agree that it feels like a pfSense config thing, but I don't know enough about it to recognize the issue. But before I went back to junk consumer stuff I'd format, reinstall, and reconfigure the Netgate using the latest version of pfSense.

Separately, does the PiHole run on the Netgate? What happens when you turn it off entirely?

Does your internet connection support DHCP? What happens when you connect the misbehaving PC directly to it? Or, if it has WiFi, hotspot your phone, connect the PC, and see if there are internet issues.

 

[Mercutio]

Is it possible that you have computers with significant time drift?

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, I use pfSense at home and it smacks of an obscure configuration issue but I couldn't tell you what. I'd maybe look at the time issue as well -- a few minutes makes a huge difference.

 

[Adcadet]

In the morning all systems were working. Perhaps they just needed time to renew their DHCP leases?

Time drift could have been an issue. At one point my son's clock was clearly off, and I manually adjusted it.

 

[Adcadet]

I run pfSense on a Netgate SG5100.

I have a Truenas Scale server running Pihole as an app. Before that, I did run a PiHole on an actual Raspberry Pi but got nervous running a critical piece of hardware on such consumer gear. I can't say I ever did much with the data from PiHole, and I'm not sure how much good it did me blocking adds. We'll see what life is like without it for a while.

 

[Mercutio]

PfSense supports pfBlockerNG, which is as good or better than running PiHole. It's just a service you can enable in DNS configuration on your appliance. In theory you can use both by making the Pfsense DNS the upstream provider for Pihole but that's needless complexity IMO.

 

[Adcadet]

At one point I used pfBlockerNG, but family approval factor was low and I liked the pretty graphics that PiHole offered instead. Maybe I'll look again at pfBlockerNG. So far nobody is complaining about the lack of add blocking.

Do you guys run an add blocker?

 

[Mercutio]

Do you guys run an add blocker?

uBlock on Firefox and uBlock Lite on other browsers + some form of network-level blocker everywhere I have control over the network. I use DNS66 for Android, which functions as a VPN but exists entirely to redirect DNS queries. I like this better than Samsung's built-in DNS redirector, which for some reason breaks if you move between mobile and WLAN frequently. The only places where I see ads are mobile apps that have them baked-in and delivered via SSL, like Tumblr.

I also use Sponsorblock specifically to kill Youtube secondary annoyances. It's a brower add-on, but it's also baked in to SmartTube, the AndroidTV Youtube client I use.

pfBlockerNG should be transparent to members of your household, just like the PiHole. Was there something that just needed to be whitelisted somewhere?