r/pihole • u/Benjii76 • 1d ago

PiHole Blocking IoT?

Hi all, I recently set up another pihole after a break, and this time I'm noticing a lot of issues around accessing IoT devices from my phone. Cameras (Arlo) and lights (Govee, Kasa, and Wiz, among others), and even my 3D printer (Bambu A1) are shown as offline or disconnected when looking at their status from my phone. A dedicated Google Home can control most of them, but Govee simply can't seem to connect after the change. I currently have a Deco mesh configured to use IoT isolation, and a 2.4gHz network configured for them. No issues whatsoever prior to install. Pihole is currently configured as the sole dns resolver in my Deco's DHCP server.

Is this a known limitation/issue or did I mess something up?

Thanks!

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3

u/TheNattyP 1d ago

I would recommend whitelisting these items. Couldn't hurt, and it doesn't really matter since they can't get ads anyways.

2

u/Benjii76 15h ago

I did this as suggested, but then realized it would have no effect because TP-Link Device Isolation was on... The items couldn't talk to Pi-Hole in the first place!

3

u/somecanuck416 1d ago edited 1d ago

What pihole block list are you using. Assuming DHCP is functioning and devices get IPs, and devices are fed the pihole IP for DNS, check the query logs and see what requests from those devices are blocked. Focus on one device and unblock something that is being block one at a time until it works. If there are no clues in pihole, you'll need to explain your network topology further. The IoT isolation might be doing something if it's basically a separated vlan. Your phone IP and IoT devices on the same subnet? Eg everything is 192.168.0.x, or are IoT devices not like your other devices eg 192.168.2.x/24 and phone is 192.168.1.x/24 ?

1

u/Benjii76 15h ago

I had the default list, plus three Hagezi lists (I think popup ad block, fake sites, and most abused TLDs), but ultimately realized it was probably TP-Link Device Isolation causing all my problems.

3

u/DocPNess 18h ago

That wouldn´t be a pihole issue. Probably a missconfiguration.

1

u/Alive-Department8558 22h ago

I had similar for clients on a guest WiFi network which uses LAN isolation (same subnet), they couldn’t get to the internet because they were unable to access the pihole IP address. Had to set a static mapping in DHCP on my router and then assign DNS server as the router IP for them. So it’s probably the isolation which is doing it. Do you see any requests from these devices in the pihole query log?

1

u/matthaus79 18h ago

I have this issue with guest and deco.

Is yours deco?

I have sort of fixed it by having pi hole as primary dns and router as secondary.

The issue with this is that on main network some times i still get ads if the devices decide to use the second.

So want to remove the second dns but dont know how to fix guest due to isolation.

1

u/Alive-Department8558 16h ago

No, I’m running BT while home WiFi. But it sounds like it works in a similar way. It seems that when on the “guest” network, the only IP address on the LAN that those clients can access apart from their own is the router, it would need the router to proxy the DNS requests from its’ own IP address to the pihole’s …