I had one plop off the ceiling onto my shoulder while I was working a few weeks ago. Took a pic and sent it to my daughters to remind them spiders are our friends and then took him off my shoulder and put him on the ground.
My philosophy… if he’s surviving in my house, he’s eating bugs and providing a service.
Thank you for posting this. I hadn’t even noticed that my 99-second-DNS.conf changes were being ignored and I wasn’t getting two dns server assignments following my v6 upgrade.
Spiders are keeping your house free of bugs that will eat your food if they find it. They’re working hard and get little thanks.
And you have to deal with the constant noise, car and foot traffic living across the street from an amusement pack. That sounds awful.
No duplicate IP concerns. They both work with the same static list and when they need to assign dynamically - because requester isn’t in the static list - they assign from a non-overlapping range. Works well.
I think it is the upstream dns but strangely only the v6 pihole is reporting it, not my v5 one.
I don’t see rate limit warning/errors in my logs but I did notice something I overlooked before. It’s only being reported by one pihole, the one running v6. The one running v5 doesn’t report anything similar and I’m not sure because v5 doesn’t report the error or because it’s not happening to that pihole. I’m seeing this error at the same time the outages occurred:
2025-10-23 02:02:48 CONNECTION_ERROR Connection error (1.0.0.1#53): failed to send UDP request (Network unreachable) 2025-10-22 14:03:54 CONNECTION_ERROR Connection error (2606:4700:4700::1111#53): failed to send UDP request (Network unreachable)
The v5 pihole does see a huge spike in requests it’s trying to service during the outage just like the other pihole, so I suspect the same error is affecting it but it’s not logging it. The error does suggest Google’s dns server is unavailable or the internet as a whole. I would think the other servers I’ve got configured it would switch to though. If so I shouldn’t experience an outage then… maybe just a delay. But if it’s switching there aren’t any errors for those, so either the errors aren’t logged or my internet isn’t really out.
Looking at the dashboard for each pihole I can see that both show failures happening at the same time… the queries skyrocket during the outage as devices retry their dns lookups. If it was only one pihole experiencing a problem, they wouldn’t both show the outage I don’t believe.
Regarding pihole order, both are DHCP providers to the network and I have each make itself the first dns provider and the other second, so order varies across my network. Whichever pihole satisfies the DHCP request is the primary for the device it satisfies and the other secondary. The outage is for every device and both piholes though, as both show their query requests go through the roof at the same time.
That’s an interesting thought. I’ve had a bad cable cause network problems for me years ago that took a long time to figure out. The 2 piholes are in different rooms in the house. Not sure if they end up connecting to the router through the same switch or not… but I don’t think there’s any one cable that could go out that would affect both and also NOT take out the internet completely. I shouldn’t be able to ping by ip address with a bad cable knocking out both piholes. Still, I’ll have to look at my setup more closely.
While I like your joke, I think the reality is worse. Ballroom supposedly not funded by taxpayers but instead being build by “donations.”
Just imagine what’s been promised…
What’s this provide that LibreWolf doesn’t?
Thank you. I don’t know much about setting up EFI partitions but I do wonder if that’s what is allowing some to seemingly avoid trouble while others don’t. I’ll try this.
It’s an i7-4700MQ. Definitely still a decent CPU and with 12GB of ram more than adequate. Not sure I’ll get touchscreen support with Linux, but I usually forget it’s a touchscreen anyway.
Thanks for the VM tip. I used VirtualBox in the past but not heard anything good about it lately.
I’ll definitely have to try that. What VM software would you recommend? My experience with VMs is very limited and only on Windows, not Linux.
The CPU is an Intel 47xx… can’t recall exact model. It’s a decent machine with 12GB of memory so should handle a VM ok even.
That’s definitely my fear. Tychosmoose’s experience gives me hope but maybe that’s just setting me up for disappointment. I guess I at least wanna make sure I keep my system backed up before updating Windows and maybe disabling auto updates.
Thank you for the reply. I only know enough about dd to know I don’t know enough to be doing anything with it, but I might try it anyway. 😀 I can clone the old to new drive using Macrium Reflect but not sure if that might impact the Linux install that follows… I assume not.
Anyway, thank you again for sharing so many details.
Thanks. I forget about the online version of MS. That might be our fallback plan if we get desperate.
Being that this laptop is probably 15 years old, I’m doubt the USB slots are going to benefit much from those high speed drives. They are USB3 at least.
Software-suite wise, I suspect that won’t be a problem long-term but I know we’ll have to look closely at least a few of our more complex documents - such as resumes - to make sure they can be converted properly. My wife is a spreadsheet maniac too, though I expect most won’t take special handling. Being able to boot back to Windows in a pinch will be beneficial though.
Mint was my thought since I’m using it on a couple home servers. I do however feel like I need to have a Windows boot option just in case she’s not happy or we run into problems with app compatibility. And honestly, I’m not at all familiar with trying to run Windows apps on Linux. I’ve only used Linux in a server environment myself, never as a desktop. I’m also about to jump ship with my primary machine too, but that’s a different story and I don’t have to worry about her having trouble using it.
App-wise, I know my wife is going to want to use Microsoft Word and Excel, and we always use this laptop for our taxes, so TurboTax. I have a feeling running from a USB drive will be way too slow.
They are not bugs that will eat your food though, which was the point I made.