Pi-hole on FreeNAS (VM Ubuntu 18.04.3) rocks

[vafk]

@kappclark
Boot checkbox is checked but it won't boot until I connect via VNC and click inside the window. The funny thing is that I do not have to confirm anything in the Ubuntu startup, just click in the black window and then the VM boots. I read that other users had the same issue so I lived with it until yesterday when I changed over to pfblockerng. More and more I come to the point that it is pointless to look for a solution if it is not available straight away. Freenas is a good device and serves its purpose but the VM's may not be that reliable. Yesterday I tried to install CentOS 8 and it won't boot unlike CentOS 7. Also reported by other users and no solution available. Again, we don't have to look for a solution if it takes too much of our time. The only reason why I put Pihole on Freenas was to save energy which I would otherwise need if I placed it on a separate computer. Now with PFSense in place, since it has lots of resources available, the job is better served by pfblocker. Plus I do not have to worry about Pihole failing and thus having no DHCP in that moment.

 

[adrianwi]

There's another checkbox in the VNC device settings that you need to uncheck. The VM should then restart automatically.

I have 4 ubuntu VMs running and they have all been rock solid, and other than a bug I reported which shows they've stopped in the WUI, when they are still running, I've had them running since updating to 11.3-U2. And they all started up automatically after the update, with only a couple of the docker services needing a little helping hand ;)

 

[vafk]

@adrianwi
I own you a thousand kudos! You solved my half year long lasted headache. I would have never suspected that this box was ticked by default especially when you have the autostart option. While I understand that this option is useful when you want to troubleshoot the vm so for the VNC to wait until you click in. But to select it by default. Stupid...
Now I moved away from Pihole to pfblockerng but I will be using the VM for other purposes. Maybe the makers of PFsense will change the default to unticked in the next release (or have done this already - my VM's are quite old).

 

[kappclark]

Wonderful. and, FWIW - going to setup a 20.04 desktop VM (tried 19.04, but no luck)..just dl the 'fresh' iso
***************]
UPDATE - 20.04 desktop, as expected, launched w/o a hitch..

 

[KevDog]

Just curious if there is any comparison of the blocking capabilities of pi-Hole vs pfBlockerNG. Anyone know of any head to head comparisons.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

@adrianwi
I own you a thousand kudos! You solved my half year long lasted headache. I would have never suspected that this box was ticked by default especially when you have the autostart option. While I understand that this option is useful when you want to troubleshoot the vm so for the VNC to wait until you click in. But to select it by default. Stupid...

You need it on when you create the VM for installation from a CD/DVD image. That's why.
I always recommend configuring a serial console and removing the VNC device altogether, afterwards. For Linux or BSD VMs.

 

[kappclark]

Have not done the comparison -- right now pi-hole is blocking about 20% of traffic ... a ton is coming from phones connected to the wifi --

 

[Pancackewaffle]

I finished setting this up at my house about two nights ago and for some reason it keeps failing every 12-24 hours. I know it is DNS because I can still ping public IP's, plus I cannot access the Web GUI of the Pi-hole.
All I have to do to fix it is log back into Ubuntu and everything works again... No extra commands or nothing. I am very confused.

I do not have enough RAM to add a 2nd VM of of this as a failover and I am not sure where to look to figure out my issue. The pihole.log file does not help.