Unable to get other devices to connect to pi-hole

Hi all,

I´m very new to this although I do have a bit of technical ability. Just new to Raspberry Pi´s in general.

I´ve installed Pi-Hole and it´s working fine locally for any website I visit on the Pi, but when I try and get any other device to connect to the DNS, by putting the DNS address in manually (192.168.1.7), they fail to connect successfully and end up failing saying there is a DNS error.

I´ve created a diagnostic report: mg64yqqmap

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

On another note, I have a D-Link DSL2885A router, that appears to not want to pass the DNS to my other devices either. I know it should only be showing as 192.168.1.1 in my device and then the router will pass the queries to the Pi-Hole, but it just seems to not be doing that and somehow still querying elsewhere as I still get internet activity and ads.

You need to make sure that the IP of the Pi-hole device is set-up within your router (maybe under the WAN settings and custom DNS). That way anything that hits your router with a DNS query will have the Pi-hole resolve it.

What's also important to keep in mind is that with the above setting on your router, all your queries will look like they are coming from your router and not the clients requesting them.

There are 2 things you can do:

Either set manually the DNS on your clients, OR disable the router's DHCP and use the Pi-hole as your DHCP server and this way your DNS server will be automatically pushed to the clients.

Under Settings/DNS in your Pi-Hole interface under Interface listening behavior you can select Listen on all interfaces, permit all origins and mind the note below it :slight_smile: This should allow DNS requests to be answered within your network.

Again, don't make it public (the Pi-hole) by opening it to the internet and you'll be up and running in no time :slight_smile:

Hi RamSet,

Thanks for your reply so soon.

Ok, so I tried this and it didn’t seem to work. I decided that just to make sure I hadn’t messed something up whilst tinkering, that I would reimage the device and start from a fresh install of Raspbian Jessie.

I upgraded DnsMasq as there was a fault there, then installed Pi-Hole and it installed nicely. I used wget instead of curl which seemed to work better for me as I installed it using sudo.

Again, it worked fine on the Pi and I tried to just test on one device altering the DNS server target manually to 192.168.1.7 and it failed to resolve.

I set the Pi as the DHCP, and changed the listening setting to the bottom as you suggested, turned DHCP off in my router, and set the DNS server to 192.168.1.7.

Devices immediately started showing up in the client list of the Admin web interface, however a lot of devices were no longer connecting to the wifi. My laptop (Apple MacBook Air) running MacOSX was failing to connect over and over and then it just connected fine, but if disconnected it would take ages to connect again, before working fine again.

My iPhone X just wasn’t having any of it and would fail to connect and repeat connecting again, and again, and again, and show up as no internet, it did connect briefly but then disconnected and wouldn’t connect again. I could get it to connect if I hit ‘renew lease’ but then after I ‘forgot the network’ it must have forgotten the IP it had cached and it wouldn’t connect again after I tried renewing the lease again.

A Windows 10 laptop I had connected to the router via Ethernet wasn’t getting any IP even after a IPCONFIG /renew.

I also cannot access the admin console from another device using http://192.168.1.7/admin.

It as as though the device is having issues being visible on the network.

I really don’t know what to do, networking isn’t really my strong point, and this is my first time delving into Raspberry Pi’s/Linux and terminal.

I really do appreciate any help provided, thank you.

It sounds like the router is fighting you back :blush:

I did have similar issues with my macbook and my iphone.
Macbook was not connecting eventhough everything else was, and my iphone was telling me that there’s no internet.

In my case, it was as easy as rebooting everything, router and pi at the same time.

The pi has a static ip from the same class as the router (192.168.1.2 and the router is 192.168.1.1)

If you only disabled the dhcp in the router, double check that the router and the dhcp server range is from the same class.

Also start the dhcp range on the pi-hole device from 192.168.1.2 or greater.

What kind of router do you have?

Hey RamSet,

I’ll have to try the restart of everything.

I’ve got a D-Link DSL-2885a.

I had the:

Pi with IP 192.168.1.7

Router IP 192.168.1.1

IP Range on Pi: 192.168.1.2 - 192.168.1.253 or 254 (can’t remember exactly).

Router DNS set to:

  • Primary: 192.168.1.7

  • Secondary: 0.0.0.0 (I also tried setting this to 192.168.1.1 as it wouldn’t let me set it to the same as the primary, and if I set the primary and secondary to 0.0.0.0 it works fine (without the Pi-Hole setup) so I assumed it was getting the ISP DNS, and thought it may do that again if I put 0.0.0.0 in the secondary (I thought it may allow a way out of the Pi-Hole resolver).

My router is a pretty straight forward setup, although I feel that the programming in the web GUI is a bit lacking, and designed for non-tech savvy people.

OK, so update on my issue.

I was having a cruise around the interwebs looking for what may be the cause and noticed someone talking about segmentation of SSID's. My 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz are hidden and the Pi can't see them, so I had it running on my guest SSID which was segmented to only receive Internet and not be able to access my personal network.

I took action and set it up so my personal SSID's are now visible, and my guest network is able to access my personal network, and swapped the Pi to connect to one of the non-guest networks.

This seems to fix the issue with the devices not being able to connect as they can now see the DHCP server correctly I assume as there is no segmentation.

However I'm now down to my last issue, where pages are not loading for any of my devices that receive the 192.168.1.7 DNS IP Address. If i set Google's DNS IP manually in the IP field (8.8.8.8) they work fine, but of course this goes around the Pi, so I would expect that.

Thoughts?

I've tried turning it off and on again :wink:

Make a new debug token. Check the output of nslookup pi.hole on devices that are trying to use Pi-hole.

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