DNS advertising and stock firmware

[Dave12398745]

I'm running stock firmware (not much choice with gt-ax11000) and I would like to be able to turn off the router broadcasting it's IP address as a DNS server (i.e merlin option "Advertise router's IP in addition to user-specified DNS" checkbox). I'm running a pi-hole for DNS and I don't want any DNS traffic going through the router, is there an NVRAM setting that will turn this off?

 

[RMerlin]

The DNS IP address provided through DHCP leases can be configured on the DHCP page.

 

[Dave12398745]

I have set up the address of the pi-hole, and only the pi-hole for DNS on the DHCP page:

However, the IP address of the router is still being added to the list of DNS servers:
Ethernet adapter Ethernet:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Realtek USB GbE Family Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . :
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.37(Preferred)
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Thursday, 29 August, 2019 10:35:03 AM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Monday, 2 September, 2019 5:17:53 AM
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.225
192.168.1.1
NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled


Thus the reason for my question on how to turn off the router's setting to advertise its own IP address in the DNS list.

 

[RMerlin]

Might not be possible to disable that.

 

[ColinTaylor]

As far as Windows clients are concerned they will always query just the first DNS server in the list (your pi-hole). They will only query the second server (the router) if the pi-hole doesn't respond within 1 second. So it's probably not an issue unless your pi-hole isn't working (in which case you might actually want it to fail-over to the router!).

 

[Dave12398745]

As far as Windows clients are concerned they will always query just the first DNS server in the list (your pi-hole). They will only query the second server (the router) if the pi-hole doesn't respond within 1 second. So it's probably not an issue unless your pi-hole isn't working (in which case you might actually want it to fail-over to the router!).

Yeah, I found there was actually an issue with the pi-hole not responding when I changed the WAN DNS to point to the pi-hole was well. Once I went in and fixed that, things started working, but now all requests look like they're coming from the router. Going to point the WAN DNS back to quad9 and see what happens.