suddenly I am facing a strange problem in my network. I have a Fritz!Box with the DHCP server disabled. The DHCP service and the DNS are done by the pi-hole with unbound installed on a Raspberry. On my iMac I also run two VMware VM's.
In the pi-hole settings > dhcp I can see the IP's of the Virtual Machines and their MAC address as physical machines connected to the network. But in tools > network, all the IP's of the Virtual Machines together with the one of the host machine are all with the same MAC address. I can't see in that table the host names of the VMs like I can see them in the dhcp table under "settings".
The problem of all this is that the port forwarding of my Fritz!Box is unable to forward any connection to the VM's because their IP address is matched with the MAC address of the host machine (the iMac), so the router give me an error, telling me that the IP address is used by another machine. The router can't see the VM's IP's nor the MAC address.
I did a "tail -f /var/log/pihole.log | grep DHCP" and I can't see anything strange there. IP's and MAC address of VM's and physical machines are perfectly matched as soon as i force a DHCP renewal request, a disconnection/reconnection or whatever.
Any suggestion? Everything worked perfectly when I was using the router's DHCP, but I have difficulties to isolate the problem... Thank you!
EDIT: I've done a reboot and now I can see the VM's with their hostnames, IP's and MAC address in the tools > network table, but the problem is still there. No way to enable port forwarding, the router keep seeing three IP's on the same MAC address.
This does not seem related to Pi-hole, but to your VM configuration.
That would suggest that your VM sends out traffic via one of its host's network interface MAC addresses, which would seem in line with your router reporting "IP address is not available".
As this seems related to your VM, you should also consider consulting your VM's documentation and support.
I was thinking about a router issue since the VM's are in bridge mode and the Pi-hole have no problem populating the DHCP table and seeing them like physical machine. And also the clients to connect each others. I will do more tests tomorrow but I am low on fantasy about what to do...
I think this is being caused by VM's network adapter setting being set to "Share with my Mac", which is the default setting if you don't change it. If so...
...this is because the VM has asked Pi-hole for an IP address and Pi-hole has supplied one, so it can see the host and its IP. But...
...the VM's network adapter IS the same as your Mac's, since it is configured to share it, so as far as the network is concerned it's just your Mac.
If that's correct, to fix this, edit the VM's Network Adapter settings and change it from "Share with my Mac" to "Bridged Ethernet" (or "Bridged Wi-Fi" if your Mac is connected via wifi). When it is set to bridged it means the VM appears to have its own MAC address and appears on your network directly as if it was a separate machine. You can see its MAC address in Advanced options.
My VM's are configured exactly as you suggested, in bridged mode. I tried to move from "autodetect" to the "wi-fi" but nothing changed. The AVM support told me that it is a limitation of the Fritz!Box, however I can't understand why since the router like any other device on that network should see the arp requests and populate its own table, but for some reason he can't see the mac address of the VM's that all the other devices can see.
You may also be affected by VMware assigning an identical MAC to a VM that is in use by another VMware server (or has been used in the past, and the FritzBox still memorises that MAC and its associated IP), see VMware's knowlegde base on Virtual machine MAC address conflicts.
Thank you for having pointed me to those resource, I will take a look at it.
For sure is not a Pi-Hole issue. It may be also because of VMware, but the fact is that with both Fusion 11 and 12 the problem is just with the Fritz!Box. I have no problem pointing virtual machines from physical machines of the lan and accessing services. Here what AVM support pointed me to:
