I can't be the ONLY one.. PiHole not getting requests, router set to route DNS to PiHole, websites still load

so Day 3 of trying to get PiHole working in conjunction with my OpenWRT router.. I have the DNS set correctly on the router from Interfaces>WAN>Advanced, but everything is acting like it doesn't exist, I've google'd the heck out of this for a few days and i'm coming here in hopes that I can get some insight into this issue!

Please follow the below template, it will help us to help you!

Expected Behaviour:

information shows up in PiHole, ads get blocked, ETC

Actual Behaviour:

no information shows up in PiHole, Ads still show, websites are still resolvable

Debug Token:

zg4vrk4p5o

Can you take screenshots of your route? Be sure to box or blur out sensitive info... We cannot see the debug token

I am also running Tomato, kind of like OWRT, they sometimes hide the DNS somewhere in the wireless area. Check that out, it may be the same issue that took me a couple of hours to resolve.

If you don’t want to set-up the dns server IP manually on each client, you could set-up the Pi-hole IP under your WAN settings, under primary DNS.

Keep in mind that if you set up a secondary public DNS there, some queries might slip through it, and ads will show up.

One more thing:

What interface is your pi-hole listening to?

what route? frmo my desktop to pi-hole? or desktop to internet?

tomato and OWRT are fairly different in this, my actual DNS settings are hidden under the wan-interface tab, and i mean HIDDEN. I have to uncheck the box telling the router to use the ISP supplied DNS servers before the box for setting my own IPs shows up.

when I set the pi-hole machine as the the only DNS, OWRT's DHCP server dies and I have to set my desltop to a static ip... and even then I can't resolve URLs. Quite frustrating.

Did you enable by chance the DHCP within the pi-hole ?

A DHCP server failure is most likely due to a config error (a wrong parameter saved in one of the config files). Upon restart, the dhcp server doesn't start because of the said config error.

Maybe the OWRT’s web interface is writing the config with a bad string.

What you can do to try the Pi-hole blocking is to run a ping on a known blocked domain (like flurry.com) from the device "hosting" pi-hole.

You can also try to set the Pi-hole IP as your sole DNS on one of your clients.
Test it like that.

If it works, you isolated the problem to the router.

What you could do in this case is disable your router's LAN DHCP and use Pi-hole as your DHCP server.

That way, the DNS setting and hence the ad-blocking, will be pushed automatically to all your connecting clients, removing the need of you actually having to set the DNS manually on them.

DHCP is NOT enabled on the Pi-hole device, let my try pinging the known-blocked domain and seeing if it works... ok, so that was blocked, but here's a REALLY interesting thing... Pi-Hole seems too have retained it's old IP in config! I installed pi-hole while on another network and migrated it too my home network, so it's got a completely wrong IP!

Check /etc/dhcpcd.conf at the end of the file, that may need to be changed with a change in network numbering.

would that be /etc/dhcp.conf on the router or the pi-hole device?

On the Pi-hole device, that's where the static IP address is set. If you want to remove the static IP and instead set a reserved lease on the router, you can remove the lines you find. Otherwise just edit the file to the proper IP and reboot the device/restart networking.

ok so that half-sorted the issue... i'm still seeing the device try to resolve to it's old 10.x.x.x address, but now it's not responding to it's own ping... hmm

To solve the resolution to address, run pihole -r and reconfigure to the correct IP address. That should put the proper IP in to the hosts file and restarts the resolver. Not sure about the ping issue though.

well... crap...
[i] Checking for existing FTL binary...
[✗] Downloading and Installing FTL
Error: Unable to get latest release location from GitHub
[✗] FTL Engine not installed

I Broke it... again :\

Can you ping github.com from the device? You might need to temporarily set /etc/resolv.conf to use something like 8.8.8.8 instead of 127.0.0.1 to kickstart the Pi-hole update process if dnsmasq isn't currently working or running.

that was it! ok onwards and forwards! straight into a brick wall, now pihole isn't loading at all, waiting on a reboot. :frowning:

ugh.. deep magic voodoo dns crap... it STILL thinks it's 10.x.x.x... I reconfigured and rebooted..

The other place to check is /etc/network/interfaces but that's not a file we modify. It shouldn't have any IP information in there, however it's something to check just to make sure. And a head 10 /etc/pihole/gravity.list will show you the IP address that Pi-hole is using to redirect to.

/etc/network/interfaces shows my hand-made edits to give the device a static ip, and head /etc/pihole/gravity.list` shows 10.x.x.x 0.r.msn.com... etc... (head 10 threw an error) in anycase, I don't really mind that it's not resolving to the "right" ip, it's not resolving to the RIGHT ip, that's what counts!

now... onto the rest of this, even though when I ping 0.r.msn.com it throws the request into the blackhole, but this request doesn't show in the panel.. and I have logging enabled so I know the resolver is doing what it's supposed to, now why is it not showing the requests in the stats? :thinking: