So i have a pi5 8gb sorta collecting dust, ive mess with it a little but i have a laptop and im not sure what use to give the pi 5? i wanted to explore ai stuff but ai requires a powerhouse of a device? Im also thought about nas but i feel i dont need nas right now?
What would you advise i do with my pi?


Same. I got mine a static IP, but everything I try to make it work, I get no network at all.
Any chance your pihole and router are both trying to be the DHCP server for the network?
Entirely possible. This is my second adventure into RPi and I have zero idea what I’m doing. I can not overstate how out of my depth I am in this. I have real expertise in several things, but this end of tech is not one of them.
Haha, I feel ya. Try logging into your router’s admin panel and see if you can disable DHCP from there, it might fix things. (Also be prepared to to set static IP on the device you connect to the panel from in case it has issues connecting if disabling DHCP doesn’t fix things or resetting your router to factory settings should also re-enable the router as the DHCP server again).
DHCP != DNS. DHCP allows you to mix pseudo-static IP addresses with dynamic IP addresses on your LAN, while DNS looks up IP addresses based on names. DHCP, or the equivalent IP address management GUI, is innocuous… you probably want to use it to specify what static IP you want the Pi to have… but you also need to tell your router DHCP to inform your in-LAN devices that the DNS server they should use is that same static IP when it hands out their assigned IP address.
I don’t really want to do anything with my setup because it works fine. If DHCP is switched on on the pi and not configured to assign addresses to a separate IP range from the router it’s far from innocuous. Some routers also don’t allow DNS settings to be modified so using the pi as DHCP lets you hand out the the pi as the DNS as well.