Possible to exclude device from PiHole?

[skybob22]

I have a work laptop that I bring between work and home as some of my work is done remotely from home. When connected to my network it just hammers the DNS server (PiHole) with reverse DNS lookup requests for IP addresses that aren't even on my network (My network is using a 172... subnet).

These happen quite fast and very consistently at at least 1 every 4-10 seconds sometimes with multiple queries at the same time.

You can see the large dip during the day when I bring the laptop to work, and spike back up when I bring it back home. According to the dashboard, over 1/3 of all queries are PTR queries...

The hardware is more than capable of handling it, but it makes the logs really messy if I'm looking for anything since I have to sift through all these entries that I don't care about. I don't really care if it does it in the background, I just don't want to see it.

 

Is there any way I can completely exclude only this one device from PiHole and logs?

Things I've tried/considered:

• Group Settings
  I tried making a separate group and adding the work computer to it. However while PiHole's group settings allow me to change what filters/black/whitelists are applied to a given device, the device still uses PiHole and the queries still show up in the logs

• Setting ANALYZE_ONLY_A_AND_AAAA
  I tried setting ANALYZE_ONLY_A_AND_AAAA to True in the PiHole settings, which does cause all the PTR/reverse DNS queries (and some other query types it does) to not appear in the logs.
  However when I do that, I find that there are ads that get through using something besides A or AAAA and when I set it back to False the ads no longer appear. So I would like to leave this set to False so that those ads remain blocked given the whole purpose of this is to block ads

• DNS Settings on the Computer
  One obvious way that would make sense to exclude it from the PiHole would be to change it's settings to not point at the PiHole as it's DNS server.
  Unfortunately, as the machine is a work-managed computer, I don't have admin access to change settings including the DNS settings. So anything I can do will have to be done from the PiHole side.

[jfb]

Fourth option - use Pi-hole as your DHCP server, and use a dnsmasq configuration file to assign that specific client a different DNS server.

How can I use Pi-hole for all my devices except one (or more)?

Configuring your router's DHCP options to force clients to use Pi-hole as their DNS server is the quickest way to get all of your network devices to use Pi-hole. But what if you want a certain device to not use it? Perhaps a family member is frustrated with white or blacklisting sites. Or maybe you want to log queries for all network devices except for a few. Solution The solution is to manually set the DNS server to on the device you don't want to use Pi-hole with. Setting the DNS server o…

Fifth option - if the work machine has a VPN, use that. The DNS for that client will go through the VPN and not your local network.

[skybob22]

@jfb

Fifth option - if the work machine has a VPN, use that. The DNS for that client will go through the VPN and not your local network.

I do have a VPN that connects to work, but that also doesn't work for a couple reasons. The VPN will only stay connected for 12 hours at a time, so at some point in the evening/night it would automatically disconnect anyway.
Also oddly enough even when connected with the VPN it would still continue to send my local network reverse-lookups at the same rate. So even if the VPN would stay connected permanently it wouldn't have fixed it.

 

@jfb

Fourth option - use Pi-hole as your DHCP server, and use a dnsmasq configuration file to assign that specific client a different DNS server.

How can I use Pi-hole for all my devices except one (or more)?

This worked, Thanks!
The PiHole was already set as the DHCP server because I'm using the Pi as a router. I set it up to point the work computer at cloudflare's DNS servers and the work computer is no longer hammering the local PiHole/router.