Sky Router - DNS options

This 6 month old post on ISP Review advises that Sky are/ were rolling firmware updates to their routers that would allow you to change the DNS.

I am due to go live today and have been given the ER115 router (cannot believe it only has 2 ports, I need 3) and currently the DNS option is not visible.

Have those of you that use this router been updated and are you able to change the DNS if you choose to.
At the time of writing, the new firmware was ER115 – 2.11.2629.R

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/11/isp-sk...

Thanks in advance.

Mitch

Edited by Mitchy_mitch (Wed 05-Aug-20 09:49:01)

The Sky ER115 never officially had the ability to change 3rd party DNS before that ISPReview article came out.

You have to backup the config file, open the config file, find the DNS server field, change it to DNS Server of your choice, then restore the config file.

I don't think there's a proper option on the ER115 to change
DNS servers, even on the latest firmware.

You can't change the DNS servers in the ER115 (or any Sky Router as far as I know). The workaround used to be to backup the router settings, change it in the file it generated, then reapply that config but that hasn't worked for a long time.

That article is talking about when Sky decided that even if you set custom DNS at device level, it would ignore it and route your DNS queries to Sky's servers anyway - that has now stopped and custom DNS at device level now works.

TL:DR - if you want custom DNS you need to set it in the device, not the router.

That's true for later models.

Not relevant to the OP, but as I understand it the SR102 never got an update to allow for 3rd party DNS at device level?

Edited by Oliver341 (Wed 05-Aug-20 15:31:30)

Thanks all.
A few days back I added the config that I required and did the download/ upload config workaround and it looked ok.

My plusnet connection went down about 30 minutes ago. I’ve added the ER115, my sync is good but the wan is currently down.

I’m hoping the handshake happens soon. Scary times changing isp when working from home.

Anyone k ow how long the wait normally is for the connection to go live ?
Thanks.

Also my raspberry pi has been assigned the as the dns address that i needed it on.

You could use pihole on the Raspberry Pi as your DNS server, although as the Sky router doesn't allow changing its DNS settings you would have to set up each device separately.

This would have the advantage of getting rid of a lot of adverts

Many thanks. That’s pretty much what I’m doing. Although I moved on from pihole to adguard hosted within homeassistant.

Luckily the workaround has worked and my pi is the dns 192.168.1.154.

Still waiting for the wan to connect.
Wish me luck.

I'm up and working. I'm well chuffed

I've lost 15Mbps sync, hopefully, ill get it back in the next 10 days.

Systems Details
Manufacturer Sky
Model ER115
Firmware Version 2.11.2629.R
DSL Firmware VersionA2pv6F039m1.d24m
Modem StatusConnected
Traffic Type:PTM
Line Rate - Upstream (Kbps):19999
Line Rate - Downstream (Kbps):66854 <-----was 79999.

DNS seems to have defaulted back to sky's own.

crosh> tracepath thinkbroadband.com
1?: [LOCALHOST] pmtu 1500
1: SkyRouter.Home 25.245ms
1: SkyRouter.Home 8.277ms
2: no reply
3: be381.pr2.hobir.isp.sky.com 25.074ms asymm 4
4: lonap-gw1.thdo.ncuk.net 21.824ms
5: po4-31.core-rs4.thdo.ncuk.net 21.903ms
6: no reply
7: no reply

In reply to a post by ukwiz:

You could use pihole on the Raspberry Pi as your DNS server, although as the Sky router doesn't allow changing its DNS settings you would have to set up each device separately.

In that scenario you can use Pi-hole as your DHCP server to save the hassle of changing DNS on each device separately

https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/how-do-i-use-pi-hole...

https://pi-hole.net/

I've seen the option to use that for some time. Is it any good? Is it as stable as a router?
Depending on how this works, I may need to implement it.
I do have a Netgear (DM200) Modem (well it's nearly a modem) and a router that I have been using for the past year with Plusnet. However, I did kind of want to go back to using just one device.

I will see how it goes.