PIA and potential pi-hole issues
PIA and potential pi-hole issues
Experiencing some odd issues. Recently, when PIA was configured to use PIA DNS, it worked for connecting but failed to resolve safelinking.net links in browsers or jdownloader. Switching PIA DNS to the pi-hole IP didn’t help either—just a connection attempt without an actual IP or link. I can only connect with a public DNS or PIA DNS. For comparison, other devices with DNS set to pi-hole function correctly, and my setup works when I disable the PIA VPN on my desktop. Pi-hole is already set up on my Raspberry Pi 4, and I have fail2ban installed. Any suggestions?
It might work to disable DHCP on the router and have the Pi act as the DHCP server, which would help IoT devices connect through the Pi-hole. However, I'd still face issues with the desktop setup.
Unless you've allowed ports for internet access, fail2ban isn't essential. Your Pi-hole shouldn't be exposed to the web. By default, VPN connections hide all traffic except those routed through them. You should have a way to whitelist your local network: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/he...al-network. Without this, it's likely preventing DNS queries to devices on your local area (where the Pi-hole resides).
I've confirmed "Allow LAN traffic" is enabled. No issues with other PIA tasks, just configuring it to point to the pi-holes address and fixing the safelinking.net domain. It seems they blocked it on PIA DNS servers, which I hadn't encountered before since I was able to connect until about two weeks ago. Ports remain open due to the VPN server setup, and the fail2ban configuration is in place. I've been using PIA for years now—local network access works fine, including servers, from my PC. The only limitation I noticed recently is switching pi-hole as the DNS while using PIA.
You're not seeing any blocks from fail2ban, and your SSH access works through Putty. It seems nmap is likely running on the Pi rather than the PC. Let me know if you need further help.
It seems PIA might be interfering with DNS instead of blocking access directly. The recent update could have altered the DNS leak protection configuration, or the update itself might have disrupted it. You could run a test like "nmap -P0 -p 53 <ip>" to verify if the port appears open. There should be logs in PIA that indicate whether nmap attempts were blocked as a security measure.