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    pfSense Unbound “Phantom” Entry

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved DHCP and DNS
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    • nfld_republicN
      nfld_republic
      last edited by

      Hi Folks - I just started playing with Home Assistant and IoT. The first thing that I did is create a new, separate interface for IoT (192.168.101.0/24 - VLAN 101). I use pfSense’s Unbound for internal DNS services but IoT will be using a Pi-Hole instance on the IoT network (which resolves out to Quad4 - not my “internal” DNS).

      The strangeness is that Unbound keeps adding pfSense’s IP address for IoT (192.168.101.254) as an additional A record (and /etc/hosts) matching the hostname of pfSense. It does not show up in the lists of hosts in pfSense. I have shutdown Unbound and manually deleted the entries from /etc/hosts and /var/unbound/host_entries.conf and after a couple of minutes it shows up again. This only happens for the new IoT network. Other (internal) interfaces (VLANs/subnets) do not do this - for example the 192.168.25.0/24 (VALN 25) does not add the additional entries.

      Anyone have any ideas? This is more than annoying as 50% of the time it resolves to the correct (internal) IP of pfSense and the other 50% it is the IoT IP of pfSense.

      Thanks!

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      • R
        rhschuld @nfld_republic
        last edited by

        @nfld_republic Apologies for the necro.

        I am having the same issue and its causing sloppy behavior when I attempt to access my pfsense web gui via the hostname. I have firewall rules that are technically responsible for the slow page loads, but the root problem is this phantom host record. In my case its 192.168.255.254. I suspect its auto added since its the highest defined IP address on the PFSense Host. I have a host override configured for my PFSense hostname with the A record for my "management" interface (allow managment traffic only to this interface from approved hosts). I suppose the work around is to rename the host override, but I would like to purge that "phantom" a record if possible.

        nfld_republicN 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • nfld_republicN
          nfld_republic @rhschuld
          last edited by

          @rhschuld Unfortunately, I cannot recall what I did to fix this. I may have exported the backup and then edited the xml file to remove it. I did a few full re-configurations since then which might have removed it as well.

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