the curious disappearance of 5ghz

Soooo, idk if the two are related - but after I started messing with Pi-Hole yesterday, my 5GHz network refused to show up in my machine’s network list. It has taken me AGES to figure this out - and I’m not entirely sure that it’s fixed for good, but it’s finally working (for now, anyway). I found this thread, where a poster talks about “changing your channel”, which isn’t something I’ve ever heard of, let alone done before…

But, you basically run sudo iwlist wlp2s0 scan | grep Frequency | sort | uniq -c | sort -n in order to see which channels are good for you (I suppose the ones that have less traffic). If that command doesn’t run, perform the prerequisites first. Anyway, once all the commands are executable - it should output a list of Wi-Fi channels.

“The “sort -n” command will rank the channels in order of fastest to slowest”

Take note of the channel’s number, then go into your router settings. You’ll want to look for something like “Wi-Fi Settings” - then look for “channel” something or other. I found “5 GHz Wi-Fi Channel” and set it to the desired channel. And now the network is discoverable by my devices again. On why it’s related to Pi-Hole setup - my guess is that I got assigned a sucky, congested channel after restarting my router, making it undiscoverable.

Another thing that happened yesterday - I somehow managed to mess up the files related to DNS resolution, which effectively broke the Internet. Fixed it by adding Cloudflare and Google (ugh, we need a fallback) DNS servers in /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf and symlinking it to /etc/resolv.conf.

Yeah, I don’t think I’m ever gonna mess with a local DNS server again. It really isn’t worth it.

Ugh.