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Orbi doesn't fall over to 2nd or 3rd DNS
I have a couple of Raspberry Pi's running PiHole for my DNS. The setup works great, but the other day the first PiHole machine got unplugged, and my devices weren't able to reach the network, despite...
So I think I figured things out.
One of my RPi is setup as my DHCP server, and when I looked the DNSMasq .conf file it was only passing on the IP address of the DNS servers for that RPi, not the addresses for the RPi PiHole severs.
I edited the .conf file, and replaced 8.8.8.8, etc with the local pihole IPs, and for the first time ever I have all three of my RPis showing blocked traffic!
Here is a look at my Pi setup. I have three now. (it's kind of an addiction.)
They are listed in order of how they appear in the DNS in my Orbi.
I recently added the RPi4, and made it the main DNS, demoting RPi3 to second.
Only my NAS, Orbi and the RPi4 are hitting the RPi3.
Nothing is using the ZeroPi.
I can't imagine that if all three were being hit every time, that the other two wouldn't show some queries or blocks.
So I think I figured things out.
One of my RPi is setup as my DHCP server, and when I looked the DNSMasq .conf file it was only passing on the IP address of the DNS servers for that RPi, not the addresses for the RPi PiHole severs.
I edited the .conf file, and replaced 8.8.8.8, etc with the local pihole IPs, and for the first time ever I have all three of my RPis showing blocked traffic!
Thanks for the information. Glad it's resolved happily.
Some more info from the folks at the PiHole discord channel:
From user Bucking_Horn:
"To have your Pi-hole on your RPi 4 distribute several DNS servers to your DHCP clients, you could create a custom configuration for dnsmasq (Pi-hole's embedded DNS/DHCP server), e.g.:
sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.d/42-multi-dhcp-dns.conf
and add the following line:
dhcp-option=option:dns-server,0.0.0.0,ip.of.pihole.2,ip.of.pihole.3
0.0.0.0 will make the Pi-hole on your RPi 4 distribute its own address, so you'd have to replace only the remaining two items with your other Pi-holes' correct IPs.
Verify your configuration is still valid:
pihole-FTL dnsmasq-test
If it doesn't come back OK, check the file content for typos.
Then apply the settings to your Pi-hole by running:
pihole restartdns
Note that my first answer still applies:
Your clients may pick any of the three Pi-holes, but likely they'd tend to prefer the first on their list."This has my setup running great!
I know it's a little specific, but if anyone else is running PiHole, I hope this helps!
Southpaw32 wrote:Note that my first answer still applies:
Your clients may pick any of the three Pi-holes, but likely they'd tend to prefer the first on their list."My experiments show that Windows 10 and Orbi will query every DNS server at the same time.
