Hey everyone, I wanted to ask for some help regarding my DNS setup and for routing requests to my selfhosted services.

Currently I use Pi-Hole as a DNS server with my routers default DNS server as the upstream server. This allowed me to define local DNS entries using Pi-hole and route my requests to these domains directly to my local services. For example I bought a domain a while ago and in preparation for setting it up, I had it entered as a local DNS entry pointing directly to my servers IP address.

Earlier today I finally got around to setting up a cloudflare tunnel to expose one of my services to the outside world using the domain I bought. Ever since I did that, all requests to that domain seem to exit my home network, go through cloudflares network and then return through the tunnel, even though I have a local DNS entry for that domain name.

What I would prefer is for the request to be routed directly to my server instead, since I am in the same network already. Since my DNS server is the Pi-Hole, I figured this should happen automatically.

Is there an issue with my Pi-Hole setup? If there is any information missing I’ll be happy to provide it. I wasn’t sure what information I could safely post here.

Solution

I think I managed to fix the problem. After enabling the option Never forward reverse lookups for private IP ranges in Pi-Hole and clearing my DNS cache again, nslookup only returns local IP addresses instead of the IPv6 address of two cloudflare servers.

  • Uninvited GuestEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Some things that stand out to me:

    1. You’re using your router’s default DNS as the upstream server. Try specifying an upstream DNS in the settings instead.

    2. Try Pihole + Unbound

    3. Could you provide an anonymized example of how you set up the local DNS entry? E.g. Domain: sub.domain.com IP: 192.168.X.Y

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Thanks for your reply. I think I managed to solve this issue and have updated my post to reflect this. Apparently I had a setting disabled in Pi-Hole which caused my DNS requests to be forwarded upstream for some reason, even though there existed a local DNS entry.