Pihole conditional forwarding - needs domain name?

1

Hi, This is my first post and I am glad to be here. I appreciate the videos and advice you provide!

I have a Pihole setup and in the top clients all I see is IP addresses. After doing some research it appears I need to configure a domain name to use that is handed out by the DHCP server. I am not using Pihole for dhcp. I was thinking about using .local until I read that is not a great idea.

Any advice for setting this all up? Should I simply use .home for the domain name? Thanks in advance for any help!

2

you can use any domain, .home, .lan, .lokal, .lab, .biz, …

3

Thanks for the reply - but I should not use local right?

4

correct, if domain is .local there is some conflict with LDAP services iirc.

5

.local is used by Apple’s bonjour service, which is why you might want to avoid that one. There are a few top level domains (TLDs) that you can use for testing as per RFC2606, but you wouldn’t really want to use them for anything else. What appears to be the recommended way (or it was last time I looked) is to buy your own external domain and use a sub domain of that. For example I use internal.mydomain.com This gives you a domain no one will ever suddenly use and you can use things like Let’s Encrypt for TLS certificates as you are using a valid domain.

6

Thank you for the reply - I had not thought about the option.