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I am having trouble with the Pi-Hole Admin Console. In the Top Clients section, somethings I see the FQDN or each client, and sometimes I only see the IP address of the client. Sometimes, I see some of the clients by FQDN and some by IP address in the same list.
Expected Behaviour:
I should see clients in the Top Clients list by FQDN
Actual Behaviour:
Sometimes the clients are show by IP address, somethings by FQDN, and sometimes a mix of the two.
Debug Token:
jr3i3qul6o
Screen shot of a mixed list. Will try to capture a shot of the FQDN list when it shows up again.
If you check out /var/log/pihole-debug.log you can see that some of the clients have host names provided with their leases, but there are a number of clients that do not have hosts names. This may be something with FTL that @DL6ER could help with. We'll see if he has any insight.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll contact DL6ER and see what he says. Here is today's screen shot. For example, JSF-iMac.jfrederick.com is 192.168.0.36. On the first screen shot, I see the IP address, on this one from today, I see the FQDN.
So. This problem "fixed" itself.. I don't know why,yet.
Last night, I installed PiVPN and tried to get everything set up properly. I was able to ping IP addr's from outside, but could not ping domain names via the VPN.
I played around with configurations based on some threads here on how to configure PiVPN/OpenVPN and Pi-Hole. After that, DNS was not working at ALL for any client. I went back and tried to reverse the changed I made...
I did finally get everything working, including the VPN stuff. And, domain names now are appearing in the Top Client's list.
Unfortunately, I don't really know what exactly fixed it, but will try to figure that out and post here.
The hostname will only show up if the Pi-hole can find the hostname via a reverse lookup. Usually this means either the hostname should be in the Pi-hole's /etc/hosts file or, if using Pi-hole's DHCP service, it will find it automatically as long as the device registers itself with a hostname.
Ok, that sound good. As noted in the second picture, all the host names that finally did show up are obtaining leases via DHCP from DNSMasq. I seems that it takes a few hours (or overnight) for the lease information to be propagated to Pi-Hole.
How is Pi-Hole interfacing with DNSMasq? Is there something I can look at to determine if DNSMask has the host information and is properly passing it to Pi-Hole?
Pi-hole just parses the dnsmasq log, so there's no need to pass information from dnsmasq to Pi-hole because Pi-hole knows everything dnsmasq tells it via the log.
@Jeffery_Frederick Any new findings in this regard? The issue you may be facing is that FTL will only try to resolve the IP to the corresponding host name once. The reason is to reduce the amount of generated PTR requests. So, if your device is unaware of the hostnames once you power it up (and FTL starts to read your old log), it won't be able to find the host names. If, however, the device already knows the proper host names when FTL is starting to analyze your log, then it will find and display them.
Please try out
sudo service pihole-FTL restart
when your machine has been running for a little longer to have FTL re-start (and hence re-process your log). Are the FQDNs there or not?
I am going through the house and finding any devices that do not present a host name when asking for an IP address. Tv's and stuff like that. I am assigning them a static mapping with a host name. Once I finish that, I should see FQDN's in the Top Clients list.
I am thinking that you are correct, there is no record in the log file when the Pi-Hole server boots up so it does to know what FQDN to assign. Once it's been running a while, all is well. I currently have the lease time set to 8760 (one year), I may shorten it to maybe 6 hours or so to see if that works. If so, then I think your theory is correct. I can live with that "issue" since I won't be rebooting the Pi-Hole server very often once I an comfortable with everything.
The hostname will only show up if the Pi-hole can find the hostname via a reverse lookup. Usually this means either the hostname should be in the Pi-hole's /etc/hosts file or, if using Pi-hole's DHCP service, it will find it automatically as long as the device registers itself with a hostname.
