Situation

I am using Pihole in a network with a google wifi router. The router (...1.1) is configured to use the Pihole server (...1.220) for DNS lookup, and all is working as wanted. So far, so good.

My question is related to the following observation: the router does not tell the clients that the DNS server can be found at ...1.220, but rather at ...1.1. The router forwards the lookup, and from the perspective of Pihole, all requests seem to come from the router:

Goal

Instead of the routers IP address, I’d like to see the client device names.

Is that possible?

What I’ve done / read / seen

I have read here about two options. However, they both involve manually maintaining a list of IP reservations.

“Just make a reservation for every device on your network.”

That is not an option in my case, as it’s too much work and new devices register with the network all the time.

From where I’m standing, I don’t see why the following process cannot be implemented:

1. A new device registers on the network.
2. It is given an IP address by the DHCP server – be it the router’s or the Pihole’s – and its self-reported name is stored.
3. Whenever this IP address does a lookup (during the time the IP remains tied to the device), its name can be shown in the table.

Am I seeing that wrong? If not, is there a reason this is not yet implemented? After all, the local IP address is not useful information, as the device it’s connected to continuously changes.