This is a new pihole install. Clean rasparian jesse lite OS. Then just pihole. Nothing else on the raspberry. I noticed something strange while examining the web interface. It shows Top Clients and listed are 2 clients. The first is the IP address of the raspberry pi with 1754 requests and the second is a localhost address 127.0.0.1 with only 1 request. No other entries. Is this normal? Thank you.
Sounds kinda normal, have you connected any other clients up to it?
What do you mean by devices? The Pi Zero is connected directly to my router via Ethernet. That's it. Then various clients on the LAN connect to it like phones, tablets, laptop, etc.
Yes, those clients. Have you set the router's DNS server to Pi-hole or set the clients' DNS servers manually to Pi-hole?
DNS is setup on the router, not individual devices
If the router does not support setting a DNS server or does not work as you would like it to, many devices allow you to manually set their DNS server.
The router does support custom DNS and that is how I have it setup - on the router.
Tested on 3 devices. All devices can visit the web interface via http://pi.hole/admin. However, ads show on one and not the others. For the test I visited huffingtonpost.com on all 3 devices:
Android phone running Lollipop 5.1, shows ads
Win 10 Laptop, no ads
iPad Air 2, no ads
So this test has revealed another issue. Why my phone is showing ads?
The web interface still shows only 2 entries as top clients. The IP of the raspberry pi zero running pihole 192.168.X.X which now has 4586 requests and 127.0.0.1 which has 14 requests.
Update, cleared the cache on the android phone by visiting chrome://net-internals/#dns and then wiping all browser data. Ads no longer show up. So it was a caching issue. So all 3 devices can visit the web interface via http://pi.hole/admin and pihole is functioning properly on all 3 devices as they are all properly blocking ads.
With this being said, why are my top clients only showing 2 entries, the IP of the PI and 127.0.0.1?
Run pihole -d for a debug log. If you tail the log (Tail pihole.log in the web interface or pihole -t), what IP is reported to be querying domains if you visit a site on a client?
Ok, I ran pihole -d and updated the debug log to you.
The only domain reported to be querying all domains is the IP of my router 192.168.X.X
Correction: Sorry I incorrectly stated that the "Top Client" list was pointing at the IP of the Pi. This is incorrect, it is pointing at the IP address of my router. As I mentioned previously I set the DNS on the router to point to the IP of the Pi so that all devices on the network would automatically use the Pi DNS. And all devices are working properly with respect to ad blocking.
Oh, ok then. Since it's your router that is showing up, that means that your router is setting itself as the DNS server and then forwarding requests to the servers you specify in the router settings. There may be an option in the router to Disable DNSmasq or to not act as a DNS forwarder itself. If you're ok with not knowing what queries were made by what client, then your current setup will work fine. If you want to have it distinguish between clients and the router doesn't have an option to stop forwarding, then you can disable DHCP on your router and enable in the Pi-hole's web interface settings.
Ok, great. I understand. I'm fine with the current setup. Thank you for your help.
Mcat12, I noticed the ads have returned to my chrome browser on my android phone. Should I open a new topic as its a separate issue? Thanks
Sure, open another topic with a new debug token.