Blocked that hard-coded google dns garbage.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
226 points (97.9% liked)
Selfhosted
40347 readers
406 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is this to block ads?
No, you can block ads with a pihole. This is because Roku hard codes its dns server as 8.8.8.8. Pihole doesn’t handle IP addresses, only DNS.
Interesting. I set an adblocking dns via DHCP and, as far as I know, the Roku respects it. Ads are blocked and I can see it failing to delivery telemetry in my dns logs (most persistent thing on the network).
I set a rule to catch outside dns to see if anything, the roku included, has been misbehaving.
Pihole blocks the basics for Roku. Things like logs ads etc. but there’s a lot more telemetry that they’re collecting. Here’s a hackernews thread about the topic and the associated article it references.
I doubt it but could this help my tv randomly crashing
It's genuinely so annoying and is such a 2023 problem
Tv crashing? Add an external device and don't use TVs for their smart features as they tend to be pretty bad.
Some days I miss my old LG Plasma. Sold the house and left it bolted to the wall. 1080P, deep blacks, crisp colors, and zero "smart" features.
It put off enough heat to warm up the living room but that was only a "bug" in the summer months. Simpler times.
Well, I'm back and can confirm the sneaky DNS resolver. I have two roku devices and they both were making requests to 8.8.8.8.
Thanks for this post! TIL.
Not familiar with Rokus, but it depends on what your filtering. Mostly it's to block needless analytics tracking. I use a pair of PiHoles for much the same purpose.
One reason used to be to switch to a different region for Netflix, etc but I'm not sure if that still works, I haven't had to use a Roku in a long time.
How would you switch regions using a firewall?
Using the firewall to force dns because the services were stupid enough to rely on dns to determine location. You would use a (usually paid) dns service hosted out of the wherever the content you want was and get access to region locked stuff like the US netflix library from abroad. This worked because vpns were being detected and rokus dns was hard coded so assumed to be trusted.
I don't know if this still works because I no longer own anything Roku and Netflix's service hasn't been worth that kind of shenanigans for a long time. It likely doesn't work anymore.
Edit: Unblock-US used to be such a service