Clients Cannot Access/Resolv Internet When Using Pihole DNS

[Bucking_Horn]

@backdoc

Just to regroup, I'm not currently using the router other than the pihole and the macbook client are getting their IP's from the router

That sentence is hard to decode.
Any client on your network has to use your router as gateway, or they wouldn't be able to connect to anything on the Internet.

@backdoc

the pihole would direct traffic through the router

No.
Pi-hole handles DNS requests only.
Pi-hole doesn't redirect any traffic to your router, nor does it see traffic on your network other than DNS.

@backdoc

But, the testing I have been doing has been to point the macbook's DNS to the pihole, which kinda eliminates some of the router issues you raised, doesn't it?

No, it rather precludes a set of potential router configuration issues from the analysis.

@backdoc

Where does the traffic go after a query?

Once a client has resolved a name to an IP address, further communication will be between the client and that IP. Traffic to IP addresses outside your current network segment will be using your router as gateway.

@backdoc

I go to the router's internet page and instead of using the ISP's DNS, I hard code the pi-hole's IP address. I did that back when my pi-hole was on wifi and it worked fine. But, since I reconfigured it to use ethernet, if I configure the router to use DNS, I can't get out to the Internet at all

I suspect something went wrong when you manually edited configuration files to switch your Pi-hole machine from WiFi to Ethernet, or maybe you assigned the same IP address twice (for both WiFi and Ethernet).

To reconcile, disable WiFi on your RPi 3, run pihole -r and Reconfigure for eth0. Check your RPi's IPv4 adddress with ip -4 address show eth0 and verify your router is using that address for DNS.

[backdoc]

Yikes! I showed my networking ignorance.

@Bucking_Horn

Any client on your network has to use your router as gateway, or they wouldn't be able to connect to anything on the Internet.

That's what I meant. I just meant that was all it was doing. Sorry for the confusing choice of words.

@Bucking_Horn

To reconcile, disable WiFi on your RPi 3, run pihole -r and Reconfigure for eth0 . Check your RPi's IPv4 adddress with ip -4 address show eth0 and verify your router is using that address for DNS.

The WiFI was already disabled, according to raspi-config. I ran the commands and updated the DNS on the router. This is what happens on the router.

Nobody else seems to have any ideas and you must be exhausted from helping me. If you're ready for me to uninstall and reinstall and see if that helps, I can do that.

Otherwise, there must be a piece that reconfigure doesn't touch. Just thinking out loud, what's the difference between installing and reconfiguring? Maybe that's the piece that's broken.

Now that I think understand a little better, maybe I can ask a better question. If the Pihole is resolving the DNS to an IP and it supposed to be giving the IP back to the client, it would seem like there would be a process, a config file or maybe a log or something that we could look at that handles that process.

Could the problem have anything to do with homebridge and the pihole not playing together nicely, like 2 instances of node.js or something that are in conflict? So, the pihole uses one to receive the query but the other to send the results back to the client? I don't know, I'm grasping for ideas. I already showed I don't understand this, too well.

[backdoc]

We haven't communicated in quite a while now. But, I want to let you know that I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and just ended up breaking a lot stuff. Keep in mind this is on a Homebridge Pi. And, so, I just threw in the towel. I did a backup of my homebridge setup and just reflashed homebridge, restored that and then used the hb-config menu to reinstall pihole.

I want to thank you for sticking with me as long as you did. If you have any questions about my setup or what I did, let me know. We spent a ton of time trying to fix this. It probably only took an hour or so to rebuild my Homebridge/Pihole setup. That was clearly the fastest approach. But, I hate not knowing where I went wrong.

I think we can close this thread, unresolved.