I am trying to setup PiHole with a Vodafone Station router I received from my Service Provider (Vodafone/Unitymedia Germany). The problem is I could not find how I can use PiHole on the router level avoiding setting the DNS in each of my devices. The German Language Help on this topic was not very helpful due to my limited german knowledge and probably advanced use case scenarios mentioned in the topics. It would by a great help if this is somehow possible and anyone has achieved this before.
A German friend of mine has the same router. To cut a long story short: You cannot do it with this box. You can not disable the DHCP server nor change the DNS address.
If you are still interested in the long story: There is a way, but it requires additional equipment. My friend solved this by putting the Vodafone station into a "bridge" (not exactly sure how it is called) mode where is only acts as a modem (not a router any longer) and bought a cheap 25€ Wi-Fi router from TP-Link. He is super happy with this combination.
If you cannot disable DHCP on the box, I would restrict the DHCP range to a single IP (the IP of the Pi-hole) and then enable DHCP on Pi-hole on a non-overlapping range.
@jfb I remeber we tried this as well and the Vodafone Station happily handed out one and the same IP address to each and every new device connecting to the network. It did not care about handling out the same address multiple times within a short time. This is clearly a bug and it may have been fixed since a few months ago. It is astonishing how low quality Vodafone products are (there was some history with older products) but since Vodafone is one of the cheapest ISPs available, this may be no real surprise.
Hmm, I have an extra router and with that I would not have any problem. But I am having bandwidth problems with the router and that’s why I wanted to go directly through the Vodafone Station.
I’ll try the solution with limiting the IP range. If that did not work, I guess I’ll either look for a new router or atleast have my private devices set the DNS to PiHole address.