Local lookup without DHCP

Help
1

Setup:

Pi Zero W with pi-hole installation - all defaults till now - on my home network with about 15 devices. DHCP is on my router.

Expected Behaviour:

The pi-hole dashboard shows names for the devices on the home network just like my router.

Actual Behaviour:

IPs are shown instead.

I understand fairly how these things work :slight_smile:. I'm aware of the conditional forwarding feature - doesn't work because my router (tp-link) doesn't offer the device names that it displays on DHCP page over DNS.

I'm also aware of the Local DNS Records feature. Since I have not fixed the IPs on the DHCP server/router, I guess these local records will need updates whenever IPs change.

Question:

Can the pi-hole do a MAC based hostname records? I have disabled randomized MACs on my devices which is more and more common these days. I wouldn't mind scripting a cron job which would periodically update the MAC/IP/hostname map - the IP is the variable here which I guess I can find with an arp lookup. Would appreciate any inputs on which pi-hole data/files should be updated by this cron job.

2

This only happens if Pi-hole knows (or can find out) the names to match the IP's. The router may know this, but the information doesn't automatically transmit to Pi-hole.

Your best approach is to reserve the IP's for clients in the router, and then map the names to IP in Local DNS records.

3

Yup! I'm thinking on the lines of what technologies exist today that pi-hole could use to discover names. Until then, I'm thinking of some scripted periodic updates.

On second thoughts, may be yes!

If I still want to try some other method, where are the local DNS records of pi-hole stored?

4

The native file is /etc/pihole/custom.list.

The web interface provides a UI to access the file, but it can be edited directly as well.

5

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