Selfhosted

Not to ask a possibly silly question but I haven't seen these questions asked and I don't know your network experience. You've supplied the actual network address of your pihole machine and not the 192.168.1.250 address shown, right? And you've set your pihole server up to have a static ip address as well, correct? You don't want it assigned dynamically and therefore randomly everytime it renews its lease.

If the ip address is statically assigned - either hard-coded as static on the machine or at least being statically assigned on your router via its mac address - then setting the dns server on your router should work. I would however assign 2nd and 3rd dns servers as Google dns or cloud flare ip addresses in case your pihole server is ever down. (1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 or some of the others). If that's all confirmed and your machines are not receiving your configured dns settings from the router, it's possible (seems unlikely) the spectrum supplied router is ignoring the settings and assigning their dns servers. If so, buy your own router and put it between your home network and the spectrum hardware. Then you have control and it doesn't matter what their hardware does. You'll just set yours up on a different subnet - 192.168.x where x doesn't match the same value as the spectrum network - and you should be good to go.

Good luck!

Ok, I see the problem. Your router needs an external DNS server for it's internet setup.

You need to set DHCP to give your pihole server as the DNS to the computers INSIDE your network. It's impossible for your router to use your LAN DNS server on the WAN port.

They are better than Comcast but that’s a low bar.

Overall I get Gig speeds for $80/m which isn’t terrible and no data cap. My previous house AT&T fiber was the same cost but better. I don’t have a choice where I live now so it’s Spectrum or DSL

I think you mean router, since you would most likely not set DNS on a modem (unless it’s a combo) — but yes I would look into getting something better that you have more control over.

Edit: gotta love new Lemmy clients that spam comment replies 🤦‍♂️

Cloudlfared with pihole is the right way to go here

https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/cloudflared/

It was a while ago, so I can't remember exactly but there is a good article here The cloudflared daemon is setup to run a standard DNS server over TCP/UDP port 53 as normal. You configure the upstream DNS to be DoT based. The clients then send DNS requests as normal to the cloudflared service and then they convert them to DoT upstream and the response is then sent back to the client as a normal DNS response.

I use PiVPN (wireguard protocol) on the same pi I use for pihole exactly like this. Port isn't forwarded, but I can split tunnel DNS for adblocking on the go and still ssh to my other server

Ah, you need to set pihole DNS in DHCP settings on the router, not in the WAN/Internet DNS for the router.

If you set the dns address manually for a device instead of relying on DHCP does dns work then? That should work fine no matter what your router is giving out.

This is purely a money move. They want to sell statistical data if I had to guess. I use DoT with Unbound because fuck Verizon.

My country has a national block list that must be followed by all ISP. Last year, they even went an extra mile to enforce the DNS hijacking at internet backbone level, so if any ISP neglect to do it, it'll still get enforced by the national internet backbone.

My ISP is fully embracing this system, to the point of performing deep packet inspection to enforce the national block list. Any blocked domain will return an IP address containing a web page full of ads (basically saying that the domain is blocked, here are some ads instead)I guess it's profitable for them to do this. They also blocked Netflix using this system for years until Netflix caved in and partner with the ISP to sell subscription (yay for no net neutrality I guess).