Blog2020 ≫ Did I break all my internets?

Trying to stop one of my servers crashing I might have broken a load of things... I said a couple of days ago:

We finished the Norwegian crime drama Wisting instead of what we planned to watch in the iplayer, as the internets were messing about. I think it was me changing my https://pi-hole.net settings so as not to have duplicate pi-holes in the house (it blocks ads and is meant to speed things up). I thought I had to have two but just one is fine.

Originally I had two pi-holes for ad blocking, thinking this was the right thing to do. You use it as a DNS server so when you request a page it says "is this an ad? block it!". You usually have two DNS servers and they're provided by your service provider, or by the google, or use one that you trust. So I thought I should have a primary pi-hole and secondary pi-hole. My secondary pi-hole was also used for home automation things, and under too much pressure, and you don't really need two, so I removed one. It is hard to change on my Huawei router, they hide this option, and now I know why. When I removed my secondary DNS it replaced it with 0.0.0.0 (on my Humax TV box at least, probably the Nintendo Switch too), which means something like "loop back to the machine that made the original request" which means just block the requests... So I think 50% of requests were probably being blocked.

My raspberry pi that spams my Slack channel with run stats like "🏃 🕡 5.6K, 5'16/K" (to mean I ran 5.6km at 6:30 an average pace of 5'16 per km) was also broken, and I see today that this is now fixed, so hopefully everything else is back to normal... I will find out for sure when I get in, when I hear the screaming about the Nintendo Switch not working.

5k: Five kilometres, just over three miles in old money.

runuary: Running at least 5k every day for the month of January.

raspberry pi: Credit card sized super cheap computer, awesome.

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Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in A small town, Kent. Wed and father to 2, I am a full stack web engineer, and I do mostly js / Node, some ruby, python, php etc. I like pubs, parkrun, restaurants, home-automation + other diy stuff, history, family tree stuff, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and time travel.