Forum Discussion
NH20A router ignoring configured DNS forwarding — confirmed with AdGuard test
I've configured my NH20A router (logged in as admin) with specific IPv4 and IPv6 DNS addresses from AdGuard. After rebooting both the router and my laptop, I confirmed that the laptop receives the router's IP via DHCP for DNS resolution — so the router should be forwarding DNS queries to AdGuard, and clients should only need the router's IP in their DNS list. That’s the expected behavior.
To verify this, I ran nslookup tests using domains that:
- Should not be cached by the router (never used before)
- Are known to be blocked by AdGuard DNS
Here’s what I found:
- "nslookup domain AdGuard-DNS" returns NXDOMAIN or 0.0.0.0 as expected (AdGuard is blocking)
- "nslookup domain router-DNS" returns valid IPs, showing the router forwarded the query to Telus DNS instead of AdGuard
This clearly shows that the router is not honoring the configured upstream DNS servers — it’s forwarding to Telus DNS regardless of my settings.
Has anyone else confirmed this behavior? Is there a known workaround or hidden setting to force the NH20A to respect custom DNS forwarding?
4 Replies
Has anyone applied specific DNS servers to the NH20A router, and how do you know if they're working?
It's been 2 weeks. Doesn't anyone use the NH20A, or maybe no one has wanted to replace the Telus DNS servers?
TELUS_SupportOfficial Support Team
For the NH20A, custom DNS settings in the admin interface are limited, and in many cases the router will still default to TELUS DNS on the backend. At this time, the device does not fully support enforcing alternate upstream DNS resolvers, even when manually entered so the behaviour you’re seeing is expected with this hardware. If you need full control over DNS (including AdGuard, Pi-hole, Cloudflare, etc.), the best workaround is to place your own router or firewall behind the TELUS hardware and manage DNS there. Many customers use bridge mode or a secondary router setup for this purpose.
