Need help figuring out of control microsoft cname domain

[Velvet-Velour]

@chrislph

Yes that would be where you switch it to manual and put in the Pi-hole's address 192.168.39.153. The screenshot already shows this, so I assume that this was you already changing it before posting? Because further up your debug log showed that the router was giving out 193.168.39.1 (itself) as the DNS.

I'm sorry. No the "Preferred DNS server" setting you see here with with Pihole's adress has been set for a long time.

@jacob.salmela

Some routers force clients to use the router as their DNS server

Even if you set Pi-hole as the only DNS server in your router's settings, the router still forces clients to use it as their primary DNS resolver.

Once those queries arrive at the router, it forwards the requests to the Pi-hole. Since the queries are all coming from one place, Pi-hole only sees the router as the origin of all DNS requests. So the traffic flow looks something like this:

Multiple network clients > Router (acting as the primary DNS server) > Pi-hole (acting as an upstream DNS server)

From the link a little above here.

@Velvet-Velour

I’ve done an attempt to set this already without changing the dns first

I have been using the router's standard DHCP setting all this time. With this I'm trying to say I changed the DHCP server IP from 192.168.39.1 (standard) to 192.168.39.53 (manual), to try and tell it this will be the new DHCP server, while still having 192.168.39.53 set in the DNS section on the other setting, so i was wondering if that was a mistake or if that is the right way to try to do it somehow. But i see now with the manual you found (that did not come with my router but i wish it did) that this is for setting local dhcp range, but there is no information about an endpoint to that range, so i don't understand.

Can i, or how can i, use these available settings switch to using pihole as dhcp server in the web interface? Another question i have is, how can i be sure these repeating www.microsoft.com queries even stop if i do that?

Can i set one range in the router's DHCP settings, and another in pihole's to not conflict somehow maybe? again I don't know what end range the router is, i only know the starting range.