Replace Airport Express with Pi-Hole incl. DHCP, NAT and PPPoe

Hello,

After a fews hours of googling and reading and I don't really find my answer.
So I'm completely new to Pi-Hole and right now it's not more that a DNS server where the Airport Express routes every DNS to the Pi-Hole.

But first let me give you a glimpse at the current setup.
Our network is like this
Modem/Router from ISP with PPPoe, but that router is only used for the tv setup boxes (uses range 192.168.1.2-50) where the modem/router is 192.168.1.1

  • Airport Express that connects with the same PPPoe connection, gives out DHCP and NAT (uses range 10.0.1.2-100) where the airport express is 10.0.1.1
    -- There are several reserved DHCP based on MAC addresses.
    -- There are also several port forwarding (like to the Synology and other apps on separate server).
    --- The wifi is provided by 3 separate airport station that are in bridge mode (so they get there IP from the Express)

Now what I would like to have is that I can see the hostnames in Pi-Hole. I know I can simply edit the host s file, but that means that I have to have fix ip addresses for every device and I don't really want to do that. (It should be better, that I can simply provide names on base of Mac address, it's the same amount of work, but it's more future proof).

I also found the setting to connect your Pi-Hole to your router with the local domain name. But from what I found that isn't supported by Apple's Airports.

So I can change the DHCP server from the Airport Express to the Pi-Hole, but what I don't seems to find is where I can add the port forwarding. Because if I disable the DHCP in the airport, the NAT will be disabled too.

And don't I need to add the PPPoe connection somewhere then? Or remains the Airport Express remains active?

And as last question. Is the raspberry pi 4 model B there powerful enough for? (I guess so, but you never know).
We have about 40 internet connected devices in our home, with several servers, a synology, and lot's of download, upload, and internal streaming (Plex server).

Thank you for reading :stuck_out_tongue:

Jurgen

Last question first - a Pi 4 is more than powerful enough (probably at least an order of magnitude more power than you need for Pi-hole). A Pi Zero is powerful enough to serve your network.

Your best option without new hardware may be reserved client IPs on the Airport Express and then map these IP's to hostnames in the /etc/hosts file on the Pi.

This is how I do it with my Airport Extreme routers (1 does NAT/DHCP, the other is in bridge mode as a repeater).

Yes, I thought that would be the most simple implementation. Any idea if that would be an idea to gives names based on the Mac addresses?
Like simply said, you can click on the Mac address in pi-hole and give it a name.

I don't believe there is a way to do this without using Pi-hole as DHCP server.

This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.