My Pi-hole is handling my DHCP, and I have Tailscale set up for remote access.
But how to I set my devices (for example, phone outside of my LAN) to route as follows: device > Pi-hole > NordVPN? Is that even possible?
The end goal being to combine the benefits of Pi-hole with a paid VPN, regardless of location.
Are you trying to route your DNS queries through your VPN device or all of your traffic?
Just your DNS queries is easy, set up the VPN as the default route for the device (using netplan or iproute2), then all queries from PiHole will go via that.
All traffic is a bit harder, unless your PiHole device is the only thing between your regular devices and the internet.
I’m trying to get all traffic through the Pi-hole and VPN. Do you mean more than setting the Pi-hole as the DHCP server?
Setting up the PiHole device as a DNS server & DHCP server still won’t make all traffic flow through it, you need it to be a gateway for all traffic that isn’t destined for an internal subnet.
To do that, you’ll need to set up your device as a router, with the necessary entries in iproute2 and iptables in order to keep lock out external connections without conntracks. You might be able to route to a turnkey container of some kind.
Is there a good dummy-proof guide on setting that up? That sounds exactly like why I bought the Pi in the first place
The easiest way is installing OpenWRT on the Pi
Would setting the pihole as the exit node work here if the pihole then routes all it’s traffic through the VPN? Or does that break things and/or add unnecessary complexity?