I had a long internet outage yesterday, and while I was able to use some of the services I provide via my local network, I was unable to access the unraid UI itself. I use the built in letsencrypt via unraid.net, so when I navigate to tower.lan/ it redirects me to 123123longstring238949849awjiawkj.unraid.net. Normally this is fine, but yesterday it made me unable to access my unraid console. I access my unraid almost daily, so my local network surely knows how to resolve that domain. Maybe this is a lack of understanding how letsencrypt works. What could have been happening? And how might I prevent this from happening in the future?

 

Router serves as the DNS, which forwards to a pihole container on my unraid.

 

Cert details:

Issuer: C = US, O = Let's Encrypt, CN = Let's Encrypt Authority X3

Expires: Mon 20 Jul 2020 09:45:40 PM PDT

Bump? This is still happening, especially as outages seem to be more frequent lately. 

The issue is DNS.

 

When you use a browser to visit https://yourhash.unraid.net, your computer does a DNS lookup to translate the hostname into an IP address, something like 192.168.1.2

 

But if your Internet is down and the DNS lookup fails, the browser won't be able to get the IP address for that hostname.

 

I don't use pihole myself, but I imagine it has a way that you can hard-code an IP address for a given hostname so that it will respond correctly even if your Internet is down. Google should be able to help with that.

 

Another option would be to modify the hosts file on your computer (not Unraid, the computer with the browser on it) so it will resolve yourhash.unraid.net to the correct local IP address. Google can help with that too.

 

Just keep in mind if your Unraid's IP address ever changes you'll need to go back and update whatever you hard-coded.