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mman3222's avatar
mman3222
Star
Jun 19, 2024
Solved

RS7000S NOT working with Pi-hole. Bug Report.

I have been running a Raspberry Pi with Pi-hole installed for years. Absolutely ZERO issues with all the routers I've had over the last 5 years.    My Netgear RS7000S is running the latest Firmware...
  • mman3222's avatar
    mman3222
    Jun 22, 2024

    Well, here is one for the books. 

     

    All the websites and forum posts say to enter your Pi-hole's IP address as the DNS server in your Netgear router's setting. That is absolutely NOT true! 

     

    Every post said "Go to Internet > DNS > enter in your Pi-Hole's IP addresss (in my case, 192.168.1.2.)

     

    That is NOT the case with Netgear routers!

     

    Instead, I had to use Public DNS servers. I used 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. 

     

    Then, go to Advanced > Setup > LAN Setup > DISABLE DHCP. 

     

    Enable DHCP in your Pi-hole. Once you do that, then only will your deviecs on your network be told that your DHCP server is your Pi-hole IP address AND your DNS server will also be handed out my your Pi-hole!

     

    Now when I run a "ipconfig /all" in my Windows box, I see that Pi-hole (192.168.1.2) is the DHCP server AND the DNS server. 

     

    Everything is working as intended now.

     

    Sheesh, Netgear! Get your stuff together! 

     

    Problem solved! I hop this helps someone in the future on Google 🙂 

schumaku's avatar
schumaku
Guru - Experienced User
Jun 22, 2024

No news unfortunately. Netgear's (consumer only?) router design and implementation does not allow using a DNS server on the local LAN IP subnet. This is prohibiting not only the deployment of a Pi-hole, but also other services operated on the router itself making use of that specific DNS server, too.

 

The disabling the router DHCP server, and reserving the MAC<->IP pair for the Pi-hole (or whichever system is used for similar purposes, e.g. certain VPN or proxy servers) is just partial workaround - at least, it allows to operate such a system. 

mman3222's avatar
mman3222
Star
Jun 22, 2024

We're all good. My post above is the proper to use Pi-hole with Netgear routers. 

 

  1. Set your Netgear's router DNS servers to something external, like 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1. If you try an internal IP address like I was doing (192.168.1.2) Netgear causes an infinite look or something. Basically, it's broken. 
  2. Disable DHCP on your Netgear router.
  3. Enable DHCP on Pi-hole.
  4. Done. 

 

Follow those steps above and everything works as it should. I can run an IPCONFIG /ALL command in Windows Command Prompt and I see 192.168.1.2 is being used at the DHCP server and the DNS server đź‘Ť

 

The steps above mentioned by hyma and "associating the server's MAC address along with the local IP address you assigned" are not needed and clearly do not make sense. There are no servers involved, so I don't know what hyma is trying to say. 

 

Part of the setup process with Pi-hole is setting your Raspberry Pi to have a static IP. I'm not mentioning all these steps, because if you already have your Pi-hole up and running you know that you should have done all these steps prior.

 

Thread can be closed. Issue resolved.