amiantos
Pi-hole DNS Health Check & Alerts
I have redundant Pi-holes on my network. Today I was looking at the Pi-Bar stats, and notice that my firs Pi-hole had almost no queries or blocks, which is highly unusual. Usually it gets 90% of the DNS traffic. I then opened a terminal and tried a nslookup against that IP, and it timed out. Long story short, I had to fiddle with that RPi to get Pi-hole back up.
Here's my feature request: Add an optional Pi-hole health check that would perform a DNS query against each configured pi-hole at some regular interval (60 seconds?). And if more than x timed out, change the Pi-bar menu bar icon a different color (orange?). It might also be useful to turn the Pi-bar icon red if all Pi-holes can't be reached.
If your Pi-hole is inaccessible over the network, PiBar should be showing "Partially Offline" in the menu bar to show you that the Pi-hole is inaccessible. Was that not happening in this case? I suppose if it's only unreachable on port 53, but the web server can still be accessed, the message wouldn't appear.
Unfortunately macOS does not allow changing menu bar icons to different colors, which is why I have it display messages like this directly in the menu bar.
Pi-hole was totally accessible over the network, and I could login to the Pi-hole admin UI just fine. However, DNS queries to that Pi-hole just timed out. I rebooted the RPi, then when into Pi-hole and cleared the network table and clicks on restart DNS resolver. At that point DNS resolution started working again. So the only way to tell the Pi-hole was "unhealthy" was by trying DNS queries.
Okay, I understand. Sounds like a good idea. I'll consider this feature for a future version of PiBar.
Awesome! BTW I bought your app on the Mac store, due to it's great features and your highly receptive nature of new features!