Graham Posted February 9, 2018 Share Posted February 9, 2018 Hi, Over the last couple of weeks, I have been trying to get Pi-hole working (and more importantly, stable) on the Orange Pi (along with the relevant Orange Pi zero H2+ ARMbian OS) without success. I realize that I am using "Tested" but as yet not marked "Stable" code, however I'm hoping this can help somebody here perhaps in terms of developing a stable OS for these little boards. I have rebuilt the SD card from scratch several time now. The SD card is of reputable make (Sandisk) and in fact I have tried two different cards, just in case this was a card issue. I'm using a reliable power supply, which I have verified by continuously monitoring it with my scope. I've had crashes during which the voltage never deviated even for nanoseconds, below 4.90V or above about 5.25V. IE the PSU is rock solid at 5V nominal. I initially suspected that temperature was an issue, as we had some very hot days here about 10 days ago, however the board crashed overnight, where ambient temperature was about 21 degrees, and the core never went above 27 degrees (according to OPi-monitor, which incidentally is a nice touch). As a test, I ran the board without Pi-hole on it, and just ARMbian and OPi-monitor running. I had done a full firmware upgrade as prescribed by ARMbian. The board ran flawlessly, including through some warmer days for more than 4 days. However when I installed Pi-hole (curl -L https://install.pi-hole.net | bash) and made sure it was fully up to date, which it was (pihole -up). Nothing else was modified or installed apart from this. The only configurations I had made, which I really don't see could cause the board to regularly crash, was to set a fixed IP address (sometimes using armbian-config, sometimes using nmtui, depending on what mood I was in during the re-install process) and set time zone to Pacific/Auckland (I live in New Zealand). These configuration changes were made also when I did the armbian standalone test for 4 days, immediately on install, not days later. Once when using dmesg, I saw in the log file that several times the cpu core was reported as being unresponsive for 22 or 23 seconds. Sorry, unfortunately I did not keep a copy of this, but I'll see if I can capture it again. Finally, when the crash happens, the board becomes totally unresponsive, and the heatsink temperature is noticeably warmer, indicating the Allwinner H2+ CPU is doing something. At this point even the debug serial port is unresponsive, and the only solution is to power down and reboot. Fortunately almost every time the board will reboot without severe corruption to the SD card. I am using an EXT4 format for the SD card which should hopefully improve recovery success over the old school FAT32 default. The crashes can happen anywhere between a couple of hours and half a day. I don't believe I have ever seen Pi-hole run for longer than about 14 hours on this board. Note I seriously doubt it has something to do with an issue with Pi-hole itself, as I am using stock standard code that many other people are using, but there must be some sort of race condition going on once it is up and running. Usually, just after installation, Pi-hole works perfectly. In fact I am typing this to you on my PC that is presently using the Pi-hole as its DNS server. DHCP is presently disabled, I am only using Pi-hole DNS capabilities (ad blocking, name resolving etc.) I have used DHCP functionality in Pi-hole as well before, but the crashes are the same. My only comment is that once when it crashed, it was not so obvious. The board appeared to be working, however I noticed that if I went to a new website full of adverts, the Pi-hole logs did not update and show that ads had been blocked. I realized at this point it had crashed or somehow become corrupted. Every other time though, the board has completely crashed with no web access to the board etc. This faulty setup should be pretty easy for you to replicate on your workbench. I'm curious to know what your findings are. If I can help any further, please do let me know. P.S I see that under the "Tested" editio of this ARMbian release, you state there is a kernel memory leak or something to that effect. To date, watching OPi-monitor, I have never seen any increase in memory usage over time. It sits rock solid at about 310MB. Regards, Graham Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guidol Posted February 9, 2018 Share Posted February 9, 2018 I had a working Pi-Hole for some months on a Orange Pi One with legacy kernel (3.4.x). But since the last week and some updates to armbian and Pi-Hole the DNS-function (also not using DHCP) doenst seem to work right. The OPi One was accessable via SSH, but DNS did one work on the most pages or not on any page. While updateing Pi-Hole via "pihole -up" from console I did see that the updatescript couldnt connect/update FTL-Source/Server, but did show at the end of the script "Update successfull". Now I did setup a second OPi One ( have now a stock of 8 OPi One, because of a very good prive for some uesed Ones) with mainline-kernel and did setup a fresh Pi-Hole - which is now working stable since 5 Days, Aside of my Pi-Hole OPi-Server I had also 2 other types of Orange Pi (Zero and R1) which have problems to be stable with the mainline kernel armbian, but its testing (not stable) and so its my problem The seem to have the same problem like your Pi-Hole. At some point they do get run hot and stop to work. My mainline OPi Zero was soo hot in his little black Qube-Case that you could smell him in the whole room The OPi R1 (without case) was also hot - but only does work anymore. I did see this the last week, because every type of Pi here is bling his "hearbeat" and the R1 didnt blink anymore. Mostly the problems did solve here by himself (in the background with the help of the developers) with a reboot / apt update & upgrade / reboot. At this point: Many thanks to alll armbian-developers and maintainers in the background making this hobby so much fun to me Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Posted February 15, 2018 Author Share Posted February 15, 2018 Again, thanks for your feedback and assistance guidol. I was a bit like a dog chasing his tail there for about a week. Finally, I did a fresh install of Raspbian Pi on the Orange Pi Zero H2+, and installed Pi-hole. The little SBC is now running perfectly, and has not had any problems. It has been running continuously for nearly a week. This is the same hardware (Power supply, Orange Pi board etc.) so definitely the problem is with ARMbian, I have proven that now (hopefully that helps someone, as for a long time there, I wasn't sure whether this was a Pi-hole/hardware/psu/ambient temperature problem). I'll make 2 comments in this regard. 1. I am fairly sure that ARMbian ran cooler by several degrees centigrade, and this may have to do with ARMbian's management of clock frequency under light load conditions (most of the time, Pi-hole is not doing very much). With ARMbian I sat at about 30 degrees C core frequency. With Raspbian (at approximately the same ambient temperature) the core levels off at about 38 degrees C. 2. I still prefer ARMbian, largely due to all the attention to detail that has been placed by the developers (CPU throttling, ARMbian monitor, ARMbian configuration tool for the Orange Pi zero boards etc.) I therefore look forward to when there is a fully stable version of ARMbian for the Orange Pi Zero H2+ (and the H5 for that matter!). Thanks for you efforts guys, you're doing a splendid job, and it makes a difference to many I'm sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Igor Posted February 15, 2018 Share Posted February 15, 2018 Mainline kernel is labeled testing since we are not sure that it runs stable. Therefore you just proceed (downgrade from armbian-config or start with a new build) to legacy kernel ... still 100x better than Raspbian with years old kernel full of bugs and security holes. Edit: I am running TVheadserver / VPN on H5 board with weeks of uptime. It would have been months, but I do an upgrade from time to time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guidol Posted February 15, 2018 Share Posted February 15, 2018 Today I did update my 2 Pi-Hole Servers (Orange Pi One with mainline kernel) to Pi-Hole V3.3https://pi-hole.net/2018/02/14/pi-hole-v3-3-released-its-extra-special/ One did work fine after the update, but the other one had problems connecting to the FTL-Part of Pi-Hole. Something like "connection refused" and not showing stats - only spinning arrows. a repair via "phole -r" did not help flushing the log via gui did not help (but I wasnt sure if it does work via the gui) So I did took a look at /var/log and deleted the pi-hole logs with rm pihole* (the empty /var/log/pihole directory hasnt been deleted) Now - after a reboot - the GUI does work like before the update. Maybe its because the following info at the pi-hole-update-page: Quote What Should I Know About The New Logging? - After updating, the old-style log files will not be readable by FTL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Posted February 19, 2018 Author Share Posted February 19, 2018 On 2/15/2018 at 10:37 PM, Igor said: Mainline kernel is labeled testing since we are not sure that it runs stable. Therefore you just proceed (downgrade from armbian-config or start with a new build) to legacy kernel ... still 100x better than Raspbian with years old kernel full of bugs and security holes. Edit: I am running TVheadserver / VPN on H5 board with weeks of uptime. It would have been months, but I do an upgrade from time to time. Hi Igor, I'm a bit confused here. When I follow the required links on the website, ARMbian takes me to a page (I'll use the Orange Pi Zero H2+ for example, but the other boards do the same, such as Zero H5) where it shows the board, and a couple of options for downloading ARMbian kernel. See my attached picture. I select the Ubuntu Server mainline kernel option, and download that, despite the fact it states "Testing" below. If this is not what I should be downloading, why does ARMbian bring me here in the first place? Where is the "legacy" code. PS to me when you say Legacy, that implies something obsolete/deprecated and no longer recommended for use. EG legacy hardware, the peoples legacy etc. implies something obsolete or left behind. I'm not the only one making this mistake if this is the case, as I know a few other people that have used ARMbian before, and they do the same thing. I think the "legacy" code should be retitled Current or Latest Stable Release etc. and there should be a big bold green button for download on the same page as the board, just my opinion. So back to my original question: Where do I locate the latest stable version of software for the Orange Pi Zero H2+ board? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Igor Posted February 19, 2018 Share Posted February 19, 2018 Look for links with "default" in the name ... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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