Pihole causing connectivity issues on other Android devices about pi-hole-for-android HOT 15 CLOSED

When I installed the app and set up the pihole the usual installation flow was almost instantly interrupted for a short moment with the error: "wget: write error: broken pipe" (two times)

This is not normal, seems like a loss of internet connectivity while downloading the Raspbian image. Redeploy and don't trust the image until it downloads without errors.

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So I tried this now many many times, but the result did not get better. In one retry it was so broken that the startup printed out scrambles of the shell commands as if they were just strings. Is there another way like pulling the image from the local storage or local device if this is really the issue here?
Another fun problem this caused is that other phones than mine where a new MAC adress is generated on every connect just clogged the IP range of my DHCP in the Fritzbox. For everyone reading this in the future: Deactivate the ranomisation in the network settings on the phone.

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Hi, switch to the 64-bit image.
In the Pi Deploy container options the image URL is:
https://github.com/DesktopECHO/Pi-hole-for-Android/releases/latest/download/raspbian.tgz

Change this to:
https://github.com/DesktopECHO/linuxdeploy-images/releases/download/v1.0/raspbian64.tgz

Reboot and redeploy.

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Hi,
this indeed helped and now there is no weird output to the log with starting and stoping but the main issue remained unfortunately. My other Androids have problems every one or two hours and start connecting and disconnecting every second.
Best regards!

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My other Androids have problems every one or two hours and start connecting and disconnecting every second.

Disable MAC randomization on the device running Pi-hole and your other Android devices. The way to do this varies by version and manufacturer but the approximate steps are:

1: Go to the Settings app on your Android device.
2: Tap on Network & Internet or Connections > Wi-Fi.
3: Tap the gear icon next to the Wi-Fi name of the router or node your device is connected to.
4: Tap on MAC address type.
5: Select Use phone MAC (or Use device MAC).
6: Disconnect and reconnect to WiFi
7: Open Pi-deploy and [ ■ STOP ] the instance, wait a few seconds and [ ⏵ START ] it back up.

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Thanks for your response. MAC randomization was off from the beginning because it causes many other problems as well (mostly things like blocking all IPs of the dhcp range)

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Login to the pihole instance and run

sudo cat /var/log/pihole.log | grep DHCP

Is there any activity logged around the same time as you see your devices connect/disconnect?

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Hi,
this command does not return any output unfortunately.
I have looked into the log and there is nothing worth mentioning. Everything seems to work as it should.
The only thing happening is that around this time the log is flooded, because every time the device connects for half a second, it creates tons of DNS requests

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I found out that I can solve this by double tapping the device with Pihole and going into the app, but doing this every hour is going to drive everyone insane.

I think I misunderstood your issue.

What's happens is Pi-hole 'dies' when it's not a foreground app, is that correcrt?

If that's the case, the OOM killer in your Android build may be too agressive. Maybe see if settings available here can help:
https://github.com/syberia-project/platform_system_memory_lmkd

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Hi,
maybe I have been not precise enough. Excuse me for that.
The PI-hole on its own is not dead and is still reachable from for example my laptop.
Every one or two hours my Android phones get into the connect disconnect loop and the only way to "solve" this is by going to the PI-hole and waking the device. I am not sure if the OOM killer is too agressive, but all settings that are reachable are set so that Android won't restrict the PI-deploy app.

Ok, now I investigated Android a bit with the adb shell and I am kind of not sure what is happening there.
So there is indeed a process 430 called lmkd but when I look into this process it seems to do nothing. The variables from the page you linked are not present according to getprop and a search through dumpsys.
I looked into the environ file there and this is the output of the variables (without values). Does this mean that it is not configured right, or am I looking in the wrong place?

Another finding was the existance of this file in the proc directory, but it is empty:

When checking out the status file this is the result:

Not sure if this helps or not but the score seems to be just 0:

I hope that this helps and does not cause extra confusion. My Android build is by the way Android 10 by the Syberia team and the build from 2020
Edit: Sorry for talking so much and not answering the question. With double tapping I mean waking the device since it is locked most of the time so that the battery can keep it running for four or five days in a row because I am for now not able to charge it constantly

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Can you un-check these options:

Reboot Device

Re-enable Lock Wi-Fi and Wake Lock

See if that helps. If it does, it'll be at the expense of battery life, but that's the cost of having WiFi up all the time.

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This seems to make the issue even worse. Now I have the problem every 10 minutes after the screen of the PI-hole host turns off.
One more thing I noticed is that my Windows pc is actually affected as well but I just did not notice it because everything seemed to work. One example is that when this issue starts I cannot connect to my router, even through the ip of the router (Fritzbox usually uses 192.168.178.1).
This is solved however after stopping and starting the PI-hole

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I do not have time for resolving this up to next month so for now I solved this by using the usb port of the wifi for charging and keep the screen on with image calibration set to almost 0 so that the screen is forced to be almost off

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Similar issue to this: meefik/linuxdeploy#1092

There are a couple of things you can try as well in the thred linked above.

Also have a look at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.thedarken.wldonate&hl=en&gl=US

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Hey, I just want to finally close this once and for all since it seems that I finally found the issue that was maybe causing all of this.
When configuring the PIHole I instruced the router to hand out a static IP to the device, but in the end it was not that static after all. After one day or so it would hand out a new one anyway and then the router would point to a ipv6 DNS adress that is not existing anymore.
You can solve this by registering your link local ipv6 in the router. This one won't change for sure. Hopefully this helps someone.

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