Pihole is not obtaining traffic originating from Google Nest Wifi connections

[pin00b]

Expected Behaviour:

Pihole should be able to filter incoming traffic through Google Nest Wifi hub and access points.

Actual Behaviour:

Just set up my Pi-hole, and while the connectivity to the router is fine, I cannot seem to get my Nest Home mesh to recognize or route through the Pi-hole properly. That means any device connected to the Google mesh devices isn't getting passed through the pi-hole first. I have no issues with devices connected directly to my ISP's router.

For context, I have the newer version of the Google Wifi (it's the Google Nest Wifi mesh with a router and two points). I've also got an ISP-supplied router, and about a half dozen homes and minis and scattered IoT things.

Here's what I've tried and failed at thus far:

• disabling DHCP assignments on the router and forcing the pi-hole to allocate DHCP
• forcing the DHCP address Pool in LAN settings on the Google Home to point to my statically-assigned Pi-hole IP (it never seems to stick, even after I click save, and always reverts to the default DHCP address pool)
• trying to set up a DHCP IP reservation via Google Home (Google Home always forces devices to assign a 192.168.8* range, and my ISP-supplied router defaults to a 192.168.0.* range)
• changing the default range on the router to match the 192.168.8*.* range, which just forces the Nest Wifi defaults to shift up by 1
• manually setting the DNS for each device's wifi settings to go through my pihole IP
• stupidly editing /etc/dnsmasq.d/05-pihole-vpn to set a static ip for the Pi-hole. This was a very, very bad idea, and it led me to uninstalling and reinstalling the pi-hole software

I'm kind of at my wits end. There isn't much constructive suggestions for how to solve this that I've found, including on here or reddit. Any suggestions on what I might be missing?
What's confounding me, is that the Google Nest

Previous research

I've followed a considerable amount of instructional advice
https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-set-up-pi-hole-2293246dc8ed
https://medium.com/@patrikmarin/setting-up-pi-hole-and-pivpn-on-google-wifi-2e8a86947931
https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/search?q=Google+Nest+Wifi+&restrict_sr=on

Setting Google Wifi DNS to pihole breaks internet connection

Expected Behaviour: I'm running ubuntu server 20.04.01 on a raspberry pi 3 with pihole 5.2.2 installed. My router is the original Google Wifi (not the more recent Nest branded version). I go into the Google Wifi app and change the DNS (Settings -> Network & General -> Advanced networking -> DNS) to "Custom" and put the ip of my pihole as the only DNS entry. I expected that this would cause all of my network devices to route DNS requests through the pihole instead of the default Google DNS serv…

[Coro]

@pin00b

That means any device connected to the Google mesh devices isn't getting passed through the pi-hole first.

Pi-hole is not a proxy. Only DNS requests are handled by Pi-hole. I'm just saying this because the devices shouldn't be "going through the pi-hole". At least not the data traffic as such. Just to keep terminology clean.

Leave out VPN for one moment, that may be causing other issues we should look at separately.

Can devices connected to your Google Wifi see the web interface of Pi-hole at the IP address of the Pi-hole? Maybe the Google Nest router doesn't provide a router for your devices into 192.168.0.x (with the sole exception of the router at 192.168.0.1 that is needed for Internet access).