In this section,
we're going to talk about some of the advanced
features in the Pi‑hole web interface.
We'll cover the query log, look at some of the long‑term data,
and how to disable Pi‑hole and why you would want to do that.
Lastly, we'll look at some of the admin tools we can use.
Let's start out with a query log.
I'll refer to this as recent queries.
You'll see why in the next slide.
This will have the recent DNS lookups broken up by time,
DNS type, domain, client, status, and more.
We can also filter out our search by domain, client, and type.
This is what that looks like.
The next menu item is Long‑term data.
On all three of these, you'll need to set the time frame first.
The first one is Graphics.
This is for visual representation of the data.
This is what that looks like.
The next is Query Log, not to be confused with Query Log from earlier,
which only showed recent queries.
This too is searchable by query status, time frame, and domain.
This is what the query log looks like.
The last item in Long‑term data is the Top Lists.
This is the top domains, top block domains,
and top clients on your network, all searchable by time frame.
Here's what that looks like.
Further down on the side bar is Disable.
You have some preset timers for how long to disable
the Pi‑hole blocking feature,
or you can set a custom time or turn it off indefinitely.
So you're probably asking, why would I disable it?
If you disable the Pi‑hole,
it will still log all the DNS queries on your network,
so this is great for troubleshooting.
Let's say you connect a new device to your network,
and it's not working properly or loading apps or some kind of problem.
You can disable your Pi‑hole for 5 minutes,
then come back into the Query Log and filter your search to that new
device and see which domains it was reaching out to.
Then, with the Pi‑hole blocking feature enabled again,
you can see which domains are getting blocked and figure out
which of those you need to add to your whitelist.
Finally, there are some admin tools.
We've covered the first two in previous sections.
Search Adlists is a cool feature.
If you see domains getting blocked in the query log and you want to
know which adlists those blocks are coming from,
you can search for that,
and it'll show the adlists that would be causing the block,
another great troubleshooting tool.
The Audit log shows domains that haven't been audited.
This is stored in a SQLite database on the back end.
The basic function is to keep track of domains that you want to
watch and decide to whitelist or blacklist.
Tail logs is the same as if you were on the command line
and type and tail ‑f on one of the logs.
If you like scrolling text, this is the thing for you.
Finally is Network.
This lets you see which devices have IP addresses,
when they were first seen, and how long they've been using the Pi‑hole.
This is good to see if there are devices on your
network which are bypassing your Pi‑hole.
I'll cover this in the last section in my final gotchas.
Time for a demo.
Let's start out.
I'll click on our Query Log,
and this shows the recent queries that are happening.
We can see them broken out by domain, device, and we can search by that.
Next, we're going to go to our Long‑term data.
The first one we're going to look at its Graphics.
Now in all of these, we do have to set a time frame.
This is a visual representation of all blocked and permitted queries.
Next is the Query Log.
We'll search this,
and this gives us the ability to look at all the different requests,
query status types, and be able to search that.
Next is our Top Lists.
I'm going to pick my time range again.
This will take a minute to populate, but this will show our top domains,
top block domains, and our top clients.
Moving further down, we have our Disable.
This is where we can turn off the blocking feature,
but we'll still log the DNS queries.
I set it for 10 seconds.
And now, nothing is being blocked.
Opening up our Tools, we're going to search our adlists.
Now we do have the ability to look in here and look for
domains by either partial or exact match.
I'm just going to type in a common social media,
found in my whitelist, and then over 100 results can be found.
Let's look at ads.double‑click and see where this pops up.
Going to do a partial search.
Okay, looks like it was found in a couple of adlists.
Next,
I'm going to pull up my Audit log and look at some of
the allowed queries and block queries.
Next is our Tail pihole.log, and this will show a live feed into our
logs of everything that's happening on our Pi‑hole.
Lastly, we're going to go to Network and take a look at
all of things in our network table,
hostnames they were given when they were first seen when they were last queried.
You can see how they're color coded, and you can actually look at
things that have never used the Pi‑hole and if they were bypassing
it. That wraps it up for this section.
We covered the query log and some of the long‑term data.
We also talked about use cases for disabling the Pi‑hole and some of the
tools that we have as Pi‑hole admins. In the next section, we will close
out the course and talk about some of the further considerations and
projects that we can do with our Pie holes.
I hope you'll join me