The original post: /r/pihole by /u/whistlingturtle on 2024-10-31 18:05:35.
Sorry for this newbie question but I’m still confused even after reading many articles on pi-hole.net (both “docs.” and “discourse.”) as well as Reddit posts.
I don’t have a Raspberry Pi, so I installed Pi-hole on my main system (Linux Mint).
It’s up and running but only intercepts local queries.
I thought that entering 0.0.0.0 as the “Primary DNS address” in the router would amount to disabling its DNS, but... maybe it falls back on the DHCP in that case, and fulfills the DNS function through my ISP?
My router doesn’t give me a way to re-direct the DHCP; it can only be enabled or disabled.
I don’t want to disable the router’s DHCP because I want all other devices on the network to still have access to a DHCP service if my main system is down.
Should I enable Pi-hole’s DHCP server anyway, with a different “DHCP IP Address Range” than the router’s? Would that work?
[Edit] Following shmimey’s replies, below, I enabled Pi-hole’s DHCP server and disabled the router’s. That instantly caused my connection to break. 😖️
[Final edit] I described the solution in this reply, below.
[Post-final edit] My rejoicing was premature. It only worked for a while. After approximately 2 hours (maybe exactly 2 hours; the graphs are not precise enough to know and the log is too short), Pi-hole starts refusing every query. This is almost identical to what happened a couple of weeks ago when I tested Pi-hole on a different machine, except that time the reply was always “N/A” (except for queries satisfied from the cache), whereas this time the reply is always “REFUSED”. I’ll have to create another post for this because the title of this one is not suitable.