Month: January 2018

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getting pi-hole to recognize individual clients behind a pfsense router

So, I installed pi-hole on a virtual machine at work, it worked great and a much better gui than pfblockerng/dnsbl but when I was looking at the list of clients the only thing showing was 192.168.0.1 which is my pfsense router,  that is strange right? well the reason that is happening is because I just added the IP for pi-hole under system > general settings > DNS server settings which worked but the problem is the DHCP server was still telling the clients to look at pfsense’s DNS resolver instead of pi-hole so all the requests were going through DNS resolver thus showing only one client in pi-hole since all the requests were coming from it.

what fixed the issue was going to system > DHCP server scroll down to “server list” and add the IP address of pi-hole and your secondary (probably your pfsense address so the requests go to DNS resolver) DNS servers and hit apply and that will make all clients show up in pi-hole’s client list.

one last thing to note, this process will make all machines on the network bypass your DNS resolver so any custom URL redirects on there will not work anymore maybe I will work on a way around that in the future, but for now you might be better off using pfblockerng/dnsbl inside pfsense unless you know a workaround if you do please share! thanks for reading and I hope this helped.

EDIT: i found a way to redirect dns requests via pi-hole here https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/wiki/FAQs#can-i-redirect-a-domain-to-a-different-domain-333

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speed issue with private internet access in a hyper-v virtual machine

i was having an issue with stuff loading crazy slow in a hyper-v virtual machine after many searches online with people with the same issues and never an issue i kept looking and eventually i stumbled on this, its for “some versions of windows” which happens to fix the issues in a hyper-v vm. atleast it seems to be the case so far immediately after doing the driver install my speeds in utorrent were great and i could still access the internet where as if i had one torrent running it wouldnt even resolve a web address. hope this helps.

here’s the directions with source linked below, i will also mirror their download here incase their link is broken in the future.

Continue reading “speed issue with private internet access in a hyper-v virtual machine”

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Raid 5 expansion conundrum

On tuesday evening at about 6:45pm i started on the seemingly annual raid expansion, whenever i start to run out of data storage on my server i simply buy another 2tb hitahchi drive off of ebay throw it in and expand the array it works great everytime so far.
disclaimer: always do a backup before attempting any kind of storage changes you never know what may or maynot happen

lets jump back about 8 months ago i decided to take my 9650se-8lpml raid controller and swap it for the 9650se-12ml only difference being one supports 8 drives and one supports 12 drives so all i had to do was swap the controllers and plug my 4x 2tb hitachi drives into the new controller everything was recognized correctly i ran through the settings and made sure everything was good. Continue reading “Raid 5 expansion conundrum”