Every month or so all my devices lose internet and the only way to connect them all back is to disconnect them from the DNS server that Pihole is running.
I set my Pihole to have a static IP but for some reason after around a month or maybe longer, it just fails. This has happened 4 times over the last while and the only fix is to essentially uninstall everything on my Pihole, disable it, and then reconfigure it from scratch again.
I’m not sure what’s going on so any help would be appreciated.
Are you assigning the static address on your pi, or are you assigning a static address on the router?
This. I’ve always done dynamic IPs on my devices and set static IPs for them on my router. Never had an issue.
This is the way. Although, to clarify, you should assign static IPs on your DHCP server, which for most SOHO networks, that's going to be your router.
If you assign statics on your hosts, your DHCP server will assign them the preferred address if available, but if it's already assigned then the DHCP server is going to give your device the middle finger and assign them whatever the fuck it wants.
Not sure if I’m misunderstanding you, but the router/DHCP server doesn’t assign an IP at all to a host that you’ve assigned statically. Any given host can be statically assigned or use DHCP, not both.
The real problem with statically assigning IPs to hosts, is that your DHCP server won’t know that and could give a new device the same IP address as your statically assigned host, causing an IP conflict, if you statically assigned the host with an IP that’s inside the DHCP scope.
What you have to do is only assign static IPs that are outside the DHCP scope, or set all hosts to use DHCP and then use reservations in your DHCP server to make sure they get the same one each time.
For infrastructure critical services I recommend reservations on the DHCP server and then set static assignment on the device for the IP reserved in DHCP. This way if the device ever fails over to DHCP for any reason the IP will not change. I'll usually also leave some small address space outside the DHCP scope available for static assignment if needed, usually at the front and usually around 20 IPs max as it's easier to let DHCP do the heavy lifting.
Static IPs are important on infra critical devices if you ever find yourself in a situation where the DHCP services are not available, you don't want them to be a single point of failure.
Just my 2 cents.
Probably a bit of both to be honest. Thanks for clarifying.