Synology RT2600AC Router Configuration Effectiveness

[tony_pihole]

Please follow the below template, it will help us to help you!

Expected Behaviour:

Is there any data available providing a consensus view as to what Synology RT2600AC settings yield the optimal performance across a router/pi-hole combination? A thorough assessment would need several controlled experiments, I'm trying to avoid duplicating what may already exist.

Actual Behaviour:

From reading many posts on many sites and trying various experiments there are a multiplicity of configuration options, each of which gives different results and underlying data. I have summarised these below.

For my application, I have no specific need to see which device is contributing to the queries, I just want to ensure the most effective solution. (I did experiment with Conditional Forwarding but I found that in some configurations it just produced so many queries from reverse IP lookups - xxx.yyy.zzz.192.in-addr.arpa - that it didn't really add value under those conditions.)

The network is set up with every device given a DHCP reservation as that's my preference for managing the devices. I'm also avoiding using the pihole to manage DHCP, keeping that in the router.

Any thoughts or suggestions from other experiences?

Debug Token:

[Mcat12]

As long as the router's DHCP allows you to set the DNS server to hand out to devices, and it only hands out those servers (no extras), then it will show the clients which made the DNS query. If the router's DHCP is unable to meet this requirement, you will not see the client which made the query (or only sometimes).