Chromecast and GoogleDNS

[TMDWU]

I'm new here, and I'm completely impressed about this project, thank you so much for making this possible!

I'm using an old Android phone as Pi-hole and Hotspot at the same time and it works incredible. But I'm wondering if it's possible to block 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 from Raspbian directly and without modifying the router? I'm 100% sure my Chromecasts are using the Pi-hole but I still see ads, I guess it's bypassing something due to its hard-coded software nature.

"Why" would you ask? the idea is to have a portable router/repeater/ad-blocker that would work anywhere I go (for example, when visiting family) and I don't have any experience regarding IPtables.

No idea if this is already in the image or if it's a planned feature out of the box, thank you so much again.

[DesktopECHO]

Hi, glad to hear it's worked out for you. I'm surprised this works actually, when your enable Hotspot on your phone Android will start up its own DNS/DHCP server and usually the hotspot fails because Pi-hole is already occupying that port.

I've never tried redirecting DNS at the gateway, but apparently you can do this with iptables.

[TMDWU]

I'm pretty impressed too, didn't expect it to work that well and it's still working to this day.

I've been playing with iptables (and fresh installations) all day and I have a weird issue, when I hit the "Stop" button on Pi Deploy, the phone automatically reboots when trying to stop the iptables (even if they worked and redirect the Chromecasts to the Pi-hole), I don't know why it happens but for now I'll enjoy the experience of having a phone/mobile repeater/ad-blocker all in one.

For additional information, I tried (another) 12 fresh installations without touching a thing and out of 2 of them, the Chromecasts used the Pi-Hole out of the box (don't know why it is so random) but ads were still playing even if it was filtering them, I suspect Google did some extra stuff these days to bypass ad-blockers.

Anyway, thanks for the link, I'll keep trying and return when I have some good news!

Edit regarding the Hotspot (for future references): for Pi-hole to start without any issues, you must disable Hotspot, turn on your Pi-hole then after that, start the hotspot.

[DesktopECHO]

Edit regarding the Hotspot (for future references): for Pi-hole to start without any issues, you must disable Hotspot, turn on your Pi-hole then after that, start the hotspot.

...aha that makes sense. The other thing that's allowing this to work now is a recent-ish change I made that allows connectivitycheck.gstatic.com to resolve before Unbound can reach the internet.

Before that change, there was a chicken-and-egg scenario where Android would refuse to compete a WiFi join until connectivitycheck.gstatic.com would resolve, but Unbound couldn't resolve because there was no internet.