Pi-hole admin page not reachable or 403-Forbidden Error

Hi evereyone,

After doing some upgrades my Pi-hole Admin Page was not reachable anymore,

while blocking still worked.

1. Problem

The lighttpd service was not running because of the missing folder /var/log/lighttpd.

So lighttpd crashes when trying to access /var/log/lighttpd/error.log and access.log.

Reinstalling Pi-hole and lighttpd didnt solve the problem.

So I first created the folder myself:

sudo mkdir /var/log/lighttpd

sudo chown -R  www-data: www-data /var/log/lighttpd

Then I reinstalled Pi-hole and lighttpd, now lighttpd was running.

Unfortunatly now I ran into 403 - Forbidden when accessing the admin page.

2. Problem

In lighttpd the fastcgi module has to be activated to work with php.

All mentioned solutions for this from the Pi-hole board didn't work for me.

After hours of trying and searching I found this workaround:

a) Uninstall Pi-hole and lighttpd (maybe not neccessary)

sudo pihole uninstall

sudo apt remove lighttpd

b) Install latest php, dnsmasq and Pi-hole (lighttpd will be installed automatically)

sudo apt install dnsmasq

sudo apt install php7.2

sudo apt install php7.2-cgi

sudo curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash   (same method as in armbian-config i think)

c) Edit /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

Adding fastcgi to server.modules:

server.modules = (
        "mod_access",
        "mod_fastcgi",
        "mod_accesslog",
        "mod_auth",
        "mod_expire",
        "mod_compress",
        "mod_redirect",
        "mod_setenv",
        "mod_rewrite"
)

And putting this at the end of the file:

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => ((
                    "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi",
                    "socket" => "/tmp/php.sock"
                )))

And voila - after reboot the Pi-hole admin-page was accessible again.

Hope this can help if someone is running in the same problem.

Greetz

Alex

Edit:

On the PiHole Board was mentioned, that there are conflicts with PiHole and dnsmasq.

So i suggest not to install it / uninstall it.

My System

Orange-Pi +2e

Armbian Bionic 5.85

Server running Pi-hole, OPI-Monitor, SMB, FTPS

Edited July 27, 20197 yr by allekz
Conflicts dnsmasq and PiHole