How to disable pi.hole DNS record

[jfb]

@jeroenvdb

All the Pi-Hole documentation is still in draft?

No.

[DL6ER]

We decided to make this behavior internal because the hostname being defined in local.list had two severe drawbacks: If you have multiple IPs available at your device, only one of then was picked. But, more important, if the addresses change (for many users the IPv6 prefix changes daily), then this record would become useless. Even more, AAAA pi.hole would point to an address that may be ancient and not reachable.
Hence, we decided to move this inside FTL where the currently used IP addresses are available for replying.

@jeroenvdb

/etc/pihole/local.list has no effect and there is no mention of a DNS record pi.hole (whats the purpose for this file?)

local.list is now being used to automatically add DNS records when OpenVPN is installed as well on the system (the wisdom is taken from /etc/openvpn/ipp.txt and updated on gravity runs).

We could add a hint (comment) about internal handling of pi.hole to the local.list file if you'd consider this helpful. dnsmasq can do a lot but it cannot do some things, hence,

@jeroenvdb

rely on proper DNS resolution and configuration files of dnsmasq

is limiting us. I'm not really seeing what the issue is with replying on dnsmasq config lines and Pi-holes config as well? Before this change, the IP address was taken from setupVars.conf, now it is automatically determined. One config file less in the chain, actually.

@jeroenvdb

Like I said, if it's mentioned in a (new/example) configuration file somewhere it should be okay or just a new configuration value PIHOLE_PTR=true in pihole-FTL.conf so a change can be seen

For Pi-hole v6.0 we will have a full (automatically generated) config file with comments and everything, see here:

Comments in pihole-FTL.conf

Actually, FTL does not care about #. Instead, everything FTL cannot parse as valid config setting is ignored. So using ; everywhere is fine as well. Prepending with ä would equally work, too, etc. Additional hint: Pi-hole v6.0 will change the config file format to TOML. The existing pihole-FTL.conf file will be automatically rewritten into a TOML document. Existing comments will be lost but the new file will contain comments for everything, for instance: # This file is managed by pihole-FTL # …

(this post is old and does not contain PIHOLE_PTR but you get the idea)

[yubiuser]

@jeroenvdb

All the Pi-Hole documentation is still in draft?

No, this

@jeroenvdb

I can see " PIHOLE_PTR=true option there.

went live yesterday.

[cheese]

hardcoded dns records are a terrible idea from 2 major perspectives; infosec, and--perhaps more important to a pihole crowd--the viability of this project. why would you want to advertise to clients that they live on a network with dns-based blocking in place?

[DanSchaper]

@cheese

hardcoded dns records are a terrible idea

dan@Viking-1:~$ dig @192.168.88.20 +short version.bind txt chaos
"dnsmasq-pi-hole-2.86"

This includes: version, author, copyright, cachesize, cache insertions,
   evictions, misses & hits, auth & servers

[DL6ER]

It has always been there, with the exception that it was only available for one single IP address in the past whereas it now extends to all addresses. This not to justify it. However, it is not a hard-coded as in "you cannot change it" option. It is a run time option and you can easily change it to deliver the hostname for all the interfaces (next version) or easily disable it.

The option to change it to the hostname seems to make a lot of sense to me. Otherwise, when there is no accompanying record in /etc/hosts, an IP address of the host may not have a hostname at all. As I said, advanced users are able to switch off all the Pi-hole featured intended to be convenience features.