Pi-hole had an update today. It didn’t indicate what the update was, it just showed the red version-numbers at the bottom, not what the update would be. If I had known that it was going from 5.x to 6, an ostensibly major update, I’d have made sure to back up the settings to have a recent backup in case for when it has problems. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I’d done the update and Pi-hole completely broke, the web-interface was no longer accessible and returned a 403 Forbidden error. I wasted 2.5 hours of my life trying to figure out a solution.
I tried to downgrade, but unlike most FOSS, Pi-hole is terrible at letting users install versions other than the latest.
I ended up having to get v6 working (which I’d eventually have to do anyway). The problem is that v6 tries to force its own webserver instead of using an external one, so it conflicts with servers that have another web-server like Apache, nginx, or lighttpd.
My solution was to modify the pihole.toml config-file to make Pi-hole run its built-in werbserver on a different port and then add a port-forwarding setting on my router so I can access it from outside. I don’t like it, but it was workable. I went ahead and changed Pihole’s directory while I was at it.
Another problem was trying to see all of the settings which were hidden away behind a basic/expert switch which I couldn’t see because it was in the corner and I’m sitting at the opposite corner of my TV and not wearing glasses (I thought it said back, not basic).
Apparently, v6 has been in beta for months, but there is very little discussion about dealing with this problem. I guess that’s a restriction of Linux, there are fewer people using it, so there’s less support available to find.