Selfhosted @lemmy.world nexusband @lemmy.world 1 yr. ago

PiHole local DNS Config understanding issues

Hi,

been running PiHole with my FritzBox as DHCP Server for a while now. Just got Fibre and the new router doesn't support "only" setting an upstream DNS (neither does it support setting a domain suffix/local domain). I've switched the DHCP off and now PiHole does DHCP as well.

The FritzBox and the new Router added the domain suffix to recognized hostnames automatically, so even if i set up a fixed IP-Address on some device or machine, i could always use the hostname.local.domain without having to set a reservation.

Can PiHole/AdGuard/Technitium even do this? Do they need some extra configuration? PiHole does recognize the Hostnames correctly for some devices, but most are missing: For example, my Proxmox host was reachable with "pve.domain.local", it isn't with PiHole, even though PiHole identified the hostname. My Homeassistant isn't recognized at all, even though the IP-Address is showing up in PiHole. The Domain under "Advanced DHCP Settings" is set up.

Am i misunderstanding something or did i configure something wrong?

Thanks!

6 comments

Turn on 'Conditional Forwarding'
- For what? Both DHCP and DNS are turned off on both routers 🤔 Tried turning it on, but that didn't change anything...
  
  Use a single router.
  
  Set Conditional Forwarding to point to that single router.
If your pihole is acting as the dhcp server, you should only need the domain set up under the advanced dhcp settings, and it appends the domain to the hostname whenever a dhcp lease is assigned.

You may have some responses from .local addresses that are not registered in dhcp since .local is used with mDNS

Alternatively, if you still have the dchp server running on one of your other boxes and you have two dhcp servers, you may be getting clients leasing from the wrong server, and in that case pihole would not know about it. If you have a different domain name set up in another dhcp server you want pihole to resolve, you can set up conditional forwarding (on the DNS settings tab) in order for pihole to know where to ask about that domain

You could also add clients manually under 'DNS Records', and you can assign whatever domain, but that's also very manual and shouldn't be needed if pihole is assigning leases and you have the domain set up properly
- DHCP leases work - they are also correctly registered with the Hostname, it's just those that have a static IPv4 configured (outside the DHCP range of course) It also does work for some, but for Homeassistant and PVE for example it does not...
  
  Are you saying that it's not working for things that have static leases, but are for dynamic? How are they being assigned? Do you have them set statically from the dhcp server, or from the end device? If it's assigned on the end device, then I don't think pihole ever picks up the hostname since that would have been sent in the dhcp discovery, and if it's static on the end device, it won't ever issue a dhcp discovery message. So it would need to be manually added to your local DNS if it's assigned static on the device

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