Dear All,
At 8am this morning, having gotten sick of my Whole Home Premium products randomly stopping working in the middle of the night... I embarked upon a quest to fix my network again. I have been defeated.
For years I have had a Pi-Hole server on my network, alongside a BT Smart Hub and latterly a four disc Whole Home Premium (which cost an arm and a leg). I had set all the devices on my Network to use Pi-Hole as their DNS server, the Smart Hub remained the DHCP server and everything was working swimmingly.
Then for some reason BT enabled IPV6 on the LAN side of the network... half of my devices received an IPV4 address and the other half an IPV6. The IPV6 cohort stopped sending their DNS requests to the Pi-Hole and instead went out to BT's DNS servers which resulted in them being flooded with Ad's and other content which I had blocked.
So early this year, I turned off the DHCP server on the Smart Hub and used the Pi-Hole as the DHCP server. This worked beautifully until late April... When the Whole Home Premium would drop connection to devices across the network... those wired directly into the LAN ports would still have a connection, everything Wireless would report no internet access.
Sometimes turning off the master disc fixed the problem (but only as long as the IP lease time) and others I would get the dreaded flash blue, flash red... solid red.
I've learned that when you are resetting all the disc's back to factory defaults that if you get the "No Discs Found" error... you are best completely deleting the App from your iPhone/iPad and reinstalling it, magically it will find the disc after that. Top Tip There.
My workaround was to re-enable the Wi-Fi on the smart hub so that iOS devices would fall back to using that when Whole Home Premium went down. I also put the master hub on a smart plug to turn it off for 10 minutes at night to reset it.
Today, having reset everything back to defaults (starting with the Smart Hub, then all the Whole Home Premium Disc's three times) and with a completely fresh install of Bullseye and Pi-Hole...
I have discovered that whilst I can get a stable connection when I do not have the Pi-Hole on my network... As soon as that is introduced as DHCP server... the Whole Home Premium starts dropping devices, DNS requests will work for 60% of sites but not the others and eventually everything stops working on Wi-Fi.
If I just direct my DNS traffic to it manually with each device I still have the situation where IPV6 ad's and other blocked sites keep getting through it and all of my PC's, Phones and Tablets get flung onto IPV6 by the Smart Hub.
I can't find anyway to disable IPV6 on the LAN side (Why?!? Why do I need it on the LAN!!) and there seems to be a fundamental lack of compatibility with non-BT DHCP / DNS devices which renders the network inoperable if they are on it.
As an aside, if I enable WiFi on the Smart Hub and don't use the Whole Home Disc's at all (fine for 30% of the house) then the Pi-Hole works perfectly as a DHCP server and filters out everything I want it to. It is only the introduction of the Whole Home Disc's which makes everything fall over.
Has anyone come across this issue and got a fix for it?
NB: If I was on standard ADSL2 or FTTP I would just skip all the BT products and use the Synology RT2600ac I have sitting about. However, I am on G.Fast and can't buy a DrayTek Vigor 166 Gen. 2 for love nor money at the moment.
Help!
