Please follow the below template, it will help us to help you!
If you are Experiencing issues with a Pi-hole install that has non-standard elements (e.g you are using nginx instead of lighttpd, or there is some other aspect of your install that is customised) - please use the Community Help category.
Expected Behaviour:
I am looking for the pihole to block my child's laptop from getting to youtube and other sites that I have added to the blocklist so that he will focus on school work. I have specifically added his laptop as a client in the list.
Actual Behaviour:
All traffic is coming through with the IP address of my google nest router. I believe that I have the correct settings in the pihole and google nest but I cant get it to see the laptop as a different wifi address. I even tried putting in the MAC address to no avail.
For background my network set up is Verizon Router -> to Nest main puck -> to un-managed switch. From the switch I have the pi-hole and camera system and home security system.
I am getting ads being blocked so the pi hole is working as advertised initially. I am just looking for what I really need it to do and really why I bought it, help keeping my kid on task.
I believe that I have followed what they have said in the first part but it is still doing the same thing. I have attached screenshots to this email to have you verify this is true. Please let me know if I am true. While I am okay with computers I am not great with this level of networking.
That indicates that your clients are not talking to Pi-hole for DNS, but to your router, which then forwards DNS requests it cannot answer itself to Pi-hole.
To employ Pi-hole's client-specific filtering, the client that you want to be filtered has to use Pi-hole for DNS directly.
You'd have to configure your router to propagate Pi-hole as local DNS server via DHCP (and potentially also via RDNSS RA options or DHPCv6 for IPv6), instead of having your router use Pi-hole as its upstream DNS server.
Alternatively, you may manually configure your kid's laptop to use Pi-hole.
Exact steps would depend on that laptop's OS.
But that also illustrates one weakness of a DNS-only approach for parental controls: Once aware of that configuration option, your kid could easily overwrite that setting with any arbitrary DNS server, regardless whether that was previously populated manually by yourself or by your OS acquiring DNS information from your router.
