I am new to Pi-Hole, and Linux, and have great hope for Pi-Hole on my home network.
Problem Statement
I am having multiple issues. One is the setup of Pi-Hole within an Active Directory environment. I currently have all desktops set up to have two DNS entries, the first points to the physical AD server, and the second points to the VM backup DC. The AD DNS servers have a forwarder record set up that points to the Pi-hole server. Name resolution seems to work as expected. I am seeing two issues. 1) I am still seeing ads. 2) Pi-Hole seems to be registering all DNS queries/lookups to the AD DNS Servers instead of the clients that actually made the requests.
Home Network Details
My home network consists of a Hyper-V server, which is running several Windows Server 2016 VMs plus an Ubuntu 20.04 headless with Pi-hole. I also have 2 ActiveDirectory domain controllers that all networked computers are a member of, as well as the other Windows Server 2016 VMs. The DCs consist of one physical, separate, server as the primary and a VM that acts as a backup domain controller. Before installing Pi-hole all workstations were issued IP Addresses from my gateway DHCP server. The DNS that was issued consisted of AD Primary, AD Secondary then two google DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. The AD DNS servers had forwarders setup to the root hints.
Everything worked well.
What I have changed since installing Pi-hole:
After Pi-Hole my DHCP server (Not using Pi-Home) issues DNS servers of ONLY the two DCs and the DC DNS servers have a single forwarder to the Pi-hole server and the use of root hint servers is disabled. So DNS resolution should go to the DC DNS server, if it can't resolve it it should forward to Pi-hole. Name resolution seems to work except for the problems I explained above. Pi-hole setup has Google setup as the Upstream DNS servers and since I am not using Pi-hole DNS I have set the "Use Conditional Forwarder" option in Pi-hole and specified my Gateway and AD domain name. Other than the creation of some groups all other settings are default.
My Actual Questions
- Is this the proper configuration for my environment?
- Why is Pi-Hole not registering the actual clients when requests are forwarded? Should it?
- Why am I still seeing ads? My expectations are that all ads should go away, is that wrong?
Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!