V6 – Post release fixes and findings

V6 – Post release fixes and findings

Well, what a busy couple of days! We have finally released v6 – and we believe by-and-large that it has been a success!  Of course, there will be a few bugs and issues that weren’t caught during testing, even with the extended beta release we were probably never going to catch everything – so we’re always keen to fix new issues as soon as they come up after a release. We’ve already released a couple of hotfixes, details of which can be seen below

FTL

Full Changelog: pi-hole/FTL@v6.0...v6.0.2

Core

Full Changelog: pi-hole/pi-hole@v6.0.1...v6.0.3

Web

Full Changelog: pi-hole/web@v6.0...v6.0.1

Docker

  • Add note about FTLCONF_misc_etc_dnsmasq_d by @yubiuser in #1719
  • Amend README to include PADD branch in custom build steps by @yubiuser in #1720
  • Improve default docker compose file to include SYS_TIME and SYS_NICE by @yubiuser in #1727

Full Changelog: 2025.02.1...2025.02.2

Common Issues & mitigations

Web Interface not loading after upgrade

This was mentioned in the announcement post, but it bares repeating:

On initial launch – FTL will attempt to bind to port 80 for plain HTTP. If it cannot bind to this port, it will fallback to port 8080 (So you might need to access the web interface at http://pi.hole:8080/admin)

You can check which port FTL is listening on by running the command pihole-FTL --config webserver.port or by looking for the config value in /etc/pihole/pihole.toml you can even change it

lighttpd still running after upgrade

Most users should have been offered a dialog box during the upgrade to choose to disable lighttpd, and most users should have chosen to do so. Unless you are using lighttpd for any other web service, it is no longer needed.
Please run the following to disable it: sudo systemctl stop lighttpd && sudo systemctl disable lighttpd

Web Interface slow on HTTPS

This is almost to be expected on lower end hardware due to all the heavy TLS lifting. Some users (and devs!) have noted that restarting FTL can speed things up again – but at the moment it is unknown if there is even anything that can be done with this. One thing that is worth experimenting with is the setting webserver.threads, which is defaulted to be automatically based on the number of cores your CPU has. It can be set anywhere up to 64 which might improve things for some people. It might also increase the load on the CPU.

You should find that navigating to the web interface with plain HTTP is much faster, and it is safe to do so within your local network.

Custom dnsmasq configs not loading

Sorry, this probably should have been expanded upon in the announcement post as part of the section about streamlining config files. By default, Pi-hole v6 will ignore anything in the directory /etc/dnsmasq.d, however – all is not lost! There are two settings of note here:

Either enable misc.etc_dnsmasq_d to restore the “old” behaviour, or if you have only a few lines you can add them directly to the misc.dnsmasq_lines setting instead. Both of these settings can be found in either the toml file, or on the web interface under All Settings -> Misc

Issues with using cloudflared as upstream DNS server

We got some reports that had intermediate connectivity issues when cloudflared is used as upstream DNS resolver. It turned out, that a new security feature in Pi-hole’s core dnsmasq which uses mIxD-Case queries seems not to be supported by cloudflared. You can mitigate the issue when setting no-0x20-encode to misc.dnsmasq_lines

Confusion around API authentication

We’ve seen a few posts of people asking where to find the API key – likely because their third party apps (that have yet to be updated to work with Pi-hole V6) are expecting one. The new API is fully documented on our docs site, but the short version of this is that there is no longer a specific API key, rather the API uses a session-based authentication token, which you can read about on the docs site.

Did you know that the API is also fully documented on your local Pi-hole install? just browse to http://your.pihole.ip/api/docs to find it! (You may need to change the port in that URL…)

You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs…

Or “controversial” changes.

Static DHCP Lease editor

There has been a lot of feedback around the text box for assigning static DHCP leases to clients, and… we hear you on this one. It has already been mentioned on our forum, but at that point it was late in the development stage – and it didn’t feel like something worth further delaying the release over.

There is some more discussion around this on an open feature request that was created off the back of a Reddit thread (Ignore the timeline on the staff comments – we moved them from one thread and into the feature request to keep the discussion open and relevant)

Temperature no longer on the web interface

During the development of v6 – we took a decision to remove the temperature from the web interface. It was never consistently displayed on every user’s interface – sometimes we couldn’t get the correct sensor reading, and sometimes we couldn’t get a sensor reading at all. We would find ourselves spending a lot of time debugging issues with sensors for very little gain.

There are other tools that are better suited for monitoring servers and hardware in general, and really an ad-block DNS server is not the place for that. We kept the CPU and RAM usage stats because they are arguably much more meaningful to the operation of Pi-hole than knowing what the temperature is.

Some enterprising users have created web interface mods already to add the temperature back, and you’re more than welcome to run them, but keep in mind the standard Pi-hole upgrade process will stash any modified files on the web interface – so you’ll need to apply them again manually. (If anyone has ever used the speedtest mod – you’ll be used to this…)

It’s not all doom and gloom

As mentioned at the top of this post  – by and large we believe this release to have gone well. Perhaps not quite as smoothly as we would have liked, but well none-the-less. For every complaint or issue we see, there are people out there that it did go smoothly for, and who just have nothing to say. For example there are 2.1k upvotes and only 382 comments on the v6 announce post on Reddit.

Maybe there are people out there that read these posts, after all… 😉

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