Clients on network not using Pihole

[awily_bard]

Expected Behaviour:

Pihole is working and all clients connected to the network are using pihole for DNS. Pihole is receiving traffic from all clients on the network.

Actual Behaviour:

The majority of clients are not connecting to pihole. When I run dig on my laptop, for instance, it does not appear in the pihole.log. But it looks like my laptop is using pihole to resolve the query.

Debug Token:

https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/7LFqaimg/

I've run pihole successfully many times. I have a new router (Dynalink WRX36) and am running a fresh install of Raspberry Pi OS on a Pi 3b+. The pi is running pihole and unbound. The Raspberry Pi is connected to the router via ethernet. My network consists of several wifi clients (phones, laptops) and a proxmox server, Smart TV, and the Pi connected directly to the router.

I'm using my router as DHCP server. I have the pihole's IP address set as the DNS server in my router's DHCP settings.

Seemingly none of the clients on my network are using the Pi to resolve DNS queries. If I run dig on my Pi, it shows up in the pihole logs. If I run dig on my laptop (connected via wifi), the dig output shows it's using the pi to resolve the query, but it does not appear in the pihole log. When I run dig on my proxmox server, the dig output shows it's using the router to resolve the query.

I tried using the pihole at a dhcp server, but that also did not work for me. I can go into more details on that but would prefer to diagnose this issue without having to use pihole at DHCP.

[red_death_gtv]

I had a similar issue with a PFsense a few months back. I had to create a rule on each of my vLans allowing my PiHole to make outbound DNS queries (port 53 & 853), then another rule below that preventing clients from making external DNS queries (port 53 & 853). I used alias to keep the rules down from 4 to 2. This make my PHole the only device on my network that can make DNS request and points all clients to my PiHole.

Hope this helps.

[awily_bard]

I suspected that it was something with my router not playing nice with pihole. I tried a couple port forwarding and port triggering rules, but didn't make progress.

I did set my WAN DNS settings to point to the pihole, and that started directing traffic through it, but all of the DNS queries were getting refused.

Maybe this is the little push I needed to put OpenWRT on my new router..