Ooo, interesting.

I am going for public access here, so it wont work. But i think this is how some routers are set up. Like i think asusrouter.net is set to 192.168.0.1, so anyone with the router can go to the same url / domain and itll send them each to their own router. Found that out the other week and thought it very clever.

So i had done this (with Adguard rather than pihole) and i think i was getting caching issues. Whether or not i was, though, i removed it and it looks like my router is handling it all just fine without the rewrite on the local DNS server.

Some folks mentioned “hairpin NAT” - i was reading the wiki on NAT last night but didnt get to hairpin, but that appears to be what is happening.

The conclusion is - my setup had been doing what i want the whole time without any DNS fiddling. I updated the original post with the speedtests.

I guess I should say that I think there were caching issues, but the problem was coming from an iphone and the Bitwarden app (connecting to the self-hosted vaultwarden).

i think this is what I was doing with Adguard and using the re-write rules, but then the client (my phone, for example) would cache the IP address and it would fail when I was out of the house/network.

Or am I misunderstanding what you are saying here?

ok, well that’s easy to set up if that is how it just works! i wonder if maybe i should (at least temporarily) self-host some sort of speedtest app on the server and check the speed from my phone while i’m on wifi using the IP, wifi using domain name, and off wifi using domain…