Pihole and Google WiFi
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Discussion

paulrockliffe

Original Poster:

16,629 posts

257 months

Wednesday 10th June 2020
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Does anyone have PiHole setup with Google Wifi?

I had PiHole running well and then swapped my WiFi setup, I cahnged the Goggle WiFi to run DNS via PiHole, but my dashboard looks a bit off, so I'm not sure it's setup well.

When I go into the PiHole dashboard and look at my network overview I see I have 5 devices, 3 are using PiHole 2 are not.

I have 10m queries from the Main Google WiFi hub, then 13k from what looks like my router and 800 from localhost. The other two are at zero, but one is the ip address for my hard-wired PC and the other I think it probably another PC that's hard-wired.

I have 39 devices on my network, mostly wireless. Is it possible to configure PiHole so they are seen individually rather than grouped under one IP Address?

I have some other devices (TVs, Raspberry PIs) hard-wired, but they don't appear on the list of IP addresses in PiHole, anyone know why?

Why do my two PC connections say they're not using PiHole, yet if I do a Google Search their adword links are blocked on those devices?

All in all I'm not sure it's setup right and could do with some pointers!

Thanks

deckster

9,631 posts

285 months

Wednesday 10th June 2020
quotequote all
Is the Pihole connected wireless or wired?

An issue with Google Wifi is that it always creates its own separate network (it needs to do this to make the mesh work). What this practically means is that things don't always communicate well between the wireless and the wired networks. The only way around this is to run your primary router in bridge mode so that Google serves as the only router on your network. It is technically possibly to run the Google router in bridge mode, but this then disables the mesh capabilities which rather defeats the object.

paulrockliffe

Original Poster:

16,629 posts

257 months

Wednesday 10th June 2020
quotequote all
deckster said:
Is the Pihole connected wireless or wired?

An issue with Google Wifi is that it always creates its own separate network (it needs to do this to make the mesh work). What this practically means is that things don't always communicate well between the wireless and the wired networks. The only way around this is to run your primary router in bridge mode so that Google serves as the only router on your network. It is technically possibly to run the Google router in bridge mode, but this then disables the mesh capabilities which rather defeats the object.
PiHole is wired.

I'm less bothered about being able to resolve queries to individual devices - It's handy when you want to Whitelist, but I can cope. It's the other bits and pieces that don't look potentially problematic.

paulrockliffe

Original Poster:

16,629 posts

257 months

Wednesday 10th June 2020
quotequote all
PiHole ahs a setting that looks like it might help; I'm not sure what my local domain name is though, or how to find out!

"Conditional Forwarding
If not configured as your DHCP server, Pi-hole won't be able to determine the names of devices on your local network. As a result, tables such as Top Clients will only show IP addresses.

One solution for this is to configure Pi-hole to forward these requests to your DHCP server (most likely your router), but only for devices on your home network. To configure this we will need to know the IP address of your DHCP server and the name of your local network.

Note: The local domain name must match the domain name specified in your DHCP server, likely found within the DHCP settings."

paulrockliffe

Original Poster:

16,629 posts

257 months

Wednesday 10th June 2020
quotequote all
I turned on that setting and used the name of the network in Google WiFi as the domain, not sure if that was right or not. The result was a large jump in the number of queries, though the same number were blocked. I turned it off again and the query number dropped way down again. It jumped from about 1000 an hour to 15,000 an hour.

What did I do?

CharlieCrocodile

1,227 posts

183 months

Wednesday 10th June 2020
quotequote all
I've got pihole working with Google wifi.

Give your pihole a static private ip, go into google wifi > advanced networking and change DNS to customised and put in the static IP of your pihole.
If you can't give pihole a static IP then reserve a DHCP allocation in google wifi.

h0b0

9,088 posts

226 months

Wednesday 10th June 2020
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I have recently set up pi-hole with google wifi and everything works. I followed a site that provided 2 options. The first was to allow visibility of each device in google's app but not pi-hole and the second was to provide visibility to devices in pi-hole but not google. unfortunately, I cant find the site I followed.

paulrockliffe

Original Poster:

16,629 posts

257 months

Thursday 11th June 2020
quotequote all
CharlieCrocodile said:
I've got pihole working with Google wifi.

Give your pihole a static private ip, go into google wifi > advanced networking and change DNS to customised and put in the static IP of your pihole.
If you can't give pihole a static IP then reserve a DHCP allocation in google wifi.
Yeah, it's all setup correctly as far as I can tell. It was configured originally (not that there's much to configure) when I had a non-mesh WiFi setup and it's really that the stats have changed dramatically since I swapped to Google, I don't know if there's a setup issue or whether it's a reporting problem.

When I changed the settings yesterday it appeared to block the same number of queries, but the number in total went through the roof - was it picking up internal chatter between devices or something else? I don't know. The lower % blocked seems wrong as my pre-Google WiFi figure was much higher, like 5% vs 50%.

While I'm here - my wife is complaining that Hollyoaks has got adverts back in it, does anyone have a link to a source for blocking All4?

Ta.

AJB88

15,928 posts

201 months

Thursday 11th June 2020
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I'd be interested if somebody has a guide? I have an older Pi which is collecting dust think its a Gen 2 one wouldn't mind putting it to use.

At the moment I use Quad 9 DNS, have also used Cloudflare etc but Cloudflare lose me the internet last week when was on nightshifts must of been down for about 4 hours, finally realised and went back to Google DNS and all was good.

paulrockliffe

Original Poster:

16,629 posts

257 months

Thursday 11th June 2020
quotequote all
AJB88 said:
I'd be interested if somebody has a guide? I have an older Pi which is collecting dust think its a Gen 2 one wouldn't mind putting it to use.

At the moment I use Quad 9 DNS, have also used Cloudflare etc but Cloudflare lose me the internet last week when was on nightshifts must of been down for about 4 hours, finally realised and went back to Google DNS and all was good.
The DNS is pretty simple, just setup pihole with a static IP address and point your DNS setting in your router to that address. In the Google setup you can add a back-up DNS, in case PiHole goes down. Then all you ahve to contend with is devices that have their DNS hard-coded.

Google will give you plenty of guides to getting it up and running on RPi.

h0b0

9,088 posts

226 months

Thursday 11th June 2020
quotequote all
you can set the range for dns IPs on google WiFi to start and stop on the pi-hole. By doing this google WiFi can’t tell the devices apart.