Hey so I'm definitely not a genius when it comes to networking and I'm really struggling with my pi hole/unbound setup. I'm using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and the plan was to have it be a small recursive dns server that my router (the telus given T3200M) would forward all the network's traffic to. Now I have Pi-Hole configured with unbound running locally on 127.0.0.1 (dig commands always display as local gateway too) so I'm pretty sure I set all the configuration files right. Running the built-in pi hole debugger and script checks say nothing wrong, and the dashboard says ads and stuff are being blocked so that's all fine and dandy but here is where I get a little confused. I've set the dns in my local gateway to the LAN and WAN ip addressing sections and made a DHCP reservation for the Pi, but when I unplug the Pi I am still able to get a connection even after checking that the gateway is configured to run only on that device. Does the T3200M have a dns service hardcoded into it? Again I'm very far from a networking warlord, but after looking over my gateway settings multiple times I can confirm it all routes to my Pi. The router is sending some traffic through the Pi when it's running (mostly my Firestick there were a million amazon get requests lol) but when the dns service they're going through (the pi) gets unplugged the router goes right back to using the default dns addresses. I think this because even with the Pi being unplugged the router has no problem getting the dns for websites I haven't visited in months, and I know dns is cached but the ttk isn't that long, so why isn't it sticking to the settings in the gateway? I don't want the router to talk to any anything but the devices on the LAN and the Pi, so my only conclusion is there is some service built into the T3200M that forces it to "just work" even though it shouldn't.
like i said I want the T3200M to only talk to the devices on the LAN and forward that to the Pi and I don't want it reaching out to any other dns systems, is there any way to do this? like could I block all traffic on port 53 so it could only run on 5335 (unbound's active port)?
I'm a student and I'm broke lol so I'd really like to not spend more money on a new router or something. If the only way is getting rid of the T3200M I will but I'd much rather use what I have
Please somebody educate me Thank you 😄
