Hi, I really don’t know much about networking but I have a question about getting around Xfinity’s DNS settings. I was setting up a pihole, and got to the part where I was pointing my router’s DNS to the raspberry pi, but Xfinity doesn’t let you change it unfortunately. I was wondering if there’s a way to set up another router, and point my router to the new one that allows a changeable DNS or something along those lines. If there’s another way to do it that makes more sense please let me know.
You can turn off DHCP on your xfinity router and turn on dhcp on pihole, once you do this all devices will use pihiole for dhcp and dns.
Buy your own cable modem. Buy your own router to connect to your cable modem, and use whatever dns servers you want. This saves money in the long run because you no longer pay for the equipment rental.
If you just want to test if pihole is working or not, you could set manual dns on the device.
You’d need to put the Xfinity Gateway into Bridge Mode, then it will just act as a modem allowing you to connect your own 3rd Party Router with customizable DNS etc.
If you can’t change it on the router, you can also set it locally on each device. May be a bit of a pain if you’ve got lots of devices, but that would work.
You can put the Xfinity gateway in “bridge mode” and connect it to a different router