My top client list displays a single entry: 192.168.X.X 3213
This is the IP of my router. You recently posted an interesting article on your blog titled "What Really Happens On Your Network? Find Out With Pi-hole" I'm anxious to try this cool feature but I only see the IP of my router as a single top client rather than the IP address of the various devices on my network.
My current setup is to set the IP address of the Pi within the WAN settings of my router. So the router is forwarding all DNS requests to the Pi DNS for resolution. Within this setup, is it possible for the pihole to identify the various clients and list their respective IP address in the top clients rather than just the single router IP?
No. You can either set the Pi-hole as your DNS in the LAN section of your router, or you can manually set each device to use Pi-hole, but this is a bit limited since some devices don't allow you to set the DNS server, so forcing it in the DHCP options allows this to work (and possibly discover what these devices are doing).
Thanks jacob.salmela. I decided to try and use the pihole DHCP server. However, I'm unsure if I set it up correctly. This is how I did it.
I disabled the DHCP server on my router
I enabled the DHCP server on the pihole.
It seems to be working as I can see the leases on the pihole. However, I'm unsure if I missed a step as I don't understand how the router knows to use the pihole DHCP server? Where's the link between the two?
DHCP is meant to be easy to get an IP address, so once the Pi-hole DHCP server is running, it is offering out leases. When you clients see that one is available, it will pick it up. As long as a DHCP server is running on your network, you clients will find it.
The router won't use it - it will have a fixed IP address (usually ending with 1) and hence doesn't need a DHCP lease by itself. It can find all devices because they get valid IP addresses from the Pi-hole. And the Pi-hole DHCP server tells all devices to use the router to get to the Internet. It knows its IP since it has been hard-coded in Pi-hole at the time as you have setup the static address (which was likely during the initial Pi-hole installation).
DL6ER, thank you for your explanation. It is very helpful. I noticed that when the pihole handed out leases it didn't have one for itself (the pi zero IP it's running on). I manually added it to the "Static DHCP leases configuration" section of the pihole DHCP server. Based on what you mentioned earlier with the hard coded IP during setup, is it necessary to manually add it as a static entry to the pihole DHCP server? Should I remove it?
The static IP should outside the range that can be handed out by the Pi-hole DHCP server. If it is not, then a static assignment should prevent this particular IP from being handed out, so that will work as well.
The new setup using the pihole DHCP server is working great. I now can see a breakdown by client whereby before using the router DHCP I only saw a single client with my router IP. Immediately to my surprise I identified that my Samsung 2016 Smart TV was the top client on my network with over 8,054 DNS hits in under 24 hours. Wow! I then easily identified the domains and blocked them. One domain had over 6,000 hits. Now my blocked domains jumped from aprox 12% to over 50% just by blocking a few Samsung domains.
My initial reason for installing the pihole was to block ads. I had no idea how effective it also is as a network traffic monitoring tool. Kudos to the dev team for this fantastic piece of software and for your timely and courteous support!