Pi-hole mislabeling client name for my smartphone on home LAN

Networking & Firewalls
1

Hello all. I operate a homelab partially consisting of an OPNsense router/firewall, Pi-hole DNS server and WAP. Which I use to self-host various services and access the internet throughout my home.

My OPNsense firewall/router acts as the network DHCP server. Whereas the Pi-hole is responsible for routing DNS queries. And the wireless access point is how my smartphone connects to the web. The OPNsense firewall, Pi-hole DNS server and WAP are connected via a switch.

I was reviewing my Pi-hole logs earlier this evening, and I noticed the client name of my smartphone is mislabeled. Instead of displaying the related IP address, as has been the case for years, Pi-hole is now showing “pi.hole” instead. Here is a screenshot of what I am referring to:

Pi-hole Client Names
Pi-hole Client Names950Ă—214 62.8 KB

My goal with opening this thread is twofold:

  1. To seek help in understanding why my smartphone’s client name is mislabelled as “pi.hole” instead of the correct IP address.
  2. And to have Pi-hole correctly label my smartphone’s client name with its assigned IP address.

Does anyone have suggestions for how I can resolve this, with the goal being to display the correct client name for my mobile device? If there are any questions I can answer, I am happy to do so.

Thank you for the opportunity to post my questions here, and for any help you can provide.

2

I don’t use pi hole, but my assumption is that somewhere there is a DNS entry for the IP of your phone within the pi hole DNS settings.

1 Like
3

Thank you for the quick response.

Based on your recommendation, I did some additional looking around in the Pi-hole settings menu, and found the “Restart DNS Resolver” and “Flush Network Table” action buttons.

Pi-hole Actions UI
Pi-hole Actions UI505Ă—114 19.2 KB

After clicking both of these buttons, the client name for my smartphone is now displaying correctly on the main admin dashboard. That was a simpler solution than I expected. I appreciate your assistance.

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4

Pi-hole will do a lookup to find name to the source DNS server or you can configure a where it should do the lookups to resolve the names. This is always hot topic on the pi-hole forums because of all the variability in ones network config.

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