DNS setting in WAN DNS

Help Community Help
1

The issue I am facing:

Hello, I tried to search in the community but didn't find similar case to mine. I had a non-standard setup, it worked, but I want to ask if there is potential problem.

Details about my system:

I have two levels routers in my setup.
First level is the ISP provider's Easybox router which is used to connect to Internet. The LAN IP address is 192.168.1.1.
Second level is my Xiaomi wireless router, the WAN IP of this router is 192.168.1.2. This is the only device in IP range 192.168.1.xxx. And the LAN IP of this Xiaomi router is 192.168.2.1.
I have all my devices under the Xiaomi router, including the Raspberry Pi 192.168.2.100.

I set up the pi hole on Raspberry Pi. And found out that the Xiaomi router wouldn't let me configure LAN DNS. So I set the WAN DNS of Xiaomi Router to 192.168.2.100. This worked! Ads are blocked.
But in the Pi hole web admin page, all requests come from the Xiaomi router (which make sense).

I would like to ask, in such a setup, are all requests going through the Xiaomi router twice or endless-loop? My understanding is, requests from all device in 192.168.2.xxx first go to Xiaomi router, then forwarded to the Raspberry Pi.
But after pi hole filtering, does the request go through the Xiaomi router again (an endless loop)? or directly goes to the first level router, and go out to internet?

I am curious here, whether this will cause unnecessary more load to the router? Thanks in advance!

What I have changed since installing Pi-hole:
n.a.

2

It depends on what you selected as upstream server, I guess you selected something external (such as Google). If so, the full path will be

  1. Client making the query
  2. Xiaomi router proxying the query
  3. Pi-hole receiving the query ans asking upstream through
  4. Xiaomi router forwarding the Internet request to
  5. Easybox sending the query to the actual Internet
  6. Google (or similiar) replies
  7. Easybox receives and forwards to
  8. Xiaomi router forwarding to your
  9. Pi-hole receiving + processing the reply and answering the original request of
  10. Xiaomi router which proxies the request back to your
  11. Client

This is ... quite a journey but neither really an issue nor is there much room for improvement in the particular setup you have there.

You could improve it by putting the Pi-hole into the realm of the Easybox (say 192.168.1.100) as this would remove steps 4 and 8 above and would allow you to use the Pi-hole as WAN DNS for the Easybox (if possible at all).

Your other option is to disable the DHCP server in the Xiaomi router and use Pi-hole's own DHCP server. This would allow direct communication with your devices and would also offer you all per-client features of Pi-hole.

3

Thank you very much for the explanation!

4

This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.