I have VPN apps on all the devices no vpn on GL router 
if I enable AdGuard Home Handle Client Requests will it be ok? Or will it cause issues because it goes via AdGuard DNS now?
Hi,
Enabling AdGuard Home Handle Client Requests means that DNS requests from your client devices that reach the router will be processed directly by the AdGuard Home instance running locally on the router. This allows AdGuard Home to identify individual clients and apply client-specific query logging and filtering.
Since the VPN applications are running directly on your devices rather than on the GL.iNet router, this option does not directly enable, disable, or control those VPN connections.
However, the DNS behavior depends on each VPN application. If the VPN application sends DNS queries through its VPN tunnel, those queries may not reach AdGuard Home.
If the device continues to use the router as its DNS server, the requests can still be processed and filtered by AdGuard Home.
Please also note that enabling this option will make the router’s domain-based VPN policies and parental-control DNS rules ineffective.
Therefore, you may enable this option if you would like AdGuard Home to identify and filter requests from individual devices. If it is important that all DNS queries are handled by your VPN provider, please also check the DNS or DNS leak-protection settings in the VPN application.
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Real world use is, with it ON you’ll get to see each clients individual DNS requests in AGH with the downside, if you use policy based routing on VPNs, that will no longer work.
With it off, every DNS request in log shows as 127.0.0.1 (DNSMasq forwards) but PBR will work.
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I’ve personally set this to ON, and have added a list of trusted DNS servers that provide faster resolution times than my ISP DNS servers. You can add as many DNS servers as you like, set AGH to use a load balancing feature for which servers it uses. Allows you to use IPv4 and IPv6 (if your ISP provides you with IPv6) in one single place, which is handy at the moment with the Flint 3 as it struggles to deal with displaying DCHPv6-PD allocated IPv6 WAN addresses and the DNS servers the ISP is providing within the GUI, you have to go to Luci to find them.
Again this is my personal preference, it may or may not work for you.
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Is this the same as the “Override DNS Settings of All Clients” option in the DNS section?
Yes in theory. If you’ve added in some custom DNS servers in your setup outside of Adguard it will force the clients use these, instead of the DNS servers allocated by your ISP when you connect to their systems.
If I understand correctly, “Override DNS Settings of All Clients” means the route rewrites any connections to DNS servers to itself (so the client devices with hard-coded DNS servers would still end up being handled by the router).
If I tick that option, and enable AdGuard (but not tick “AdGuard handle client requests”), will they still go through AdGuard? Are both settings doing the same thing, or do they force the DNS through a different path? (I presume that when AdGuard is enabled, it applies to all DNS going through the router)?
Perhaps a better way to ask, is what exactly do both of those options (“Override DNS Settings of All Clients” and “AdGuard Home Handle Client Requests”) actually do. What underlying configuration do they set?
Thanks!