Experiences in Roku vs. Ad-blocking

[FixItInPost]

Hi, I just wanted to share some info about my recent battling with Roku, in case it's helpful to anyone else. I mention (below) an SNBforums thread that helped me resolve this, and I want to thank two posters there (Crimliar and drinkingbird) who gave enough info to help me solve my problem. I hope sharing my experience can pay it forward by helping someone else.

I'm running Merlin with Skynet and Diversion. Months ago, my Roku suddenly started having on-screen ads again. I figured out that I had some local devices (including the Roku) repeatedly hitting 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and ignoring my ad-blocker. Seems that some companies started hard-coding DNS servers in firmware, using DOT or DOH to bypass DNS Director. So I used Skynet to just block those IPs. Any device hard-coded to those DNS servers would fail to connect, fall back to router-assigned DNS, and ad-blocking worked again. And all was good.

Until Roku got wise.

Last night, Roku pushed a new update that bricked my Roku. It was in Recovery Mode this morning and wouldn't finish recovery. I had to hard reset it, then redoing setup I got "cannot connect to the Internet." Like before, nothing I did with DNS Director affected the Roku. While flailing for answers, I disabled Skynet, and suddenly the Roku worked ... with ads. I eventually got the Roku to work with Skynet enabled, by unbanning 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Those blocks were the problem. If the Roku couldn't reach those IPs, it became a pumpkin, until they were unblocked. And while they were unblocked ... I got ads.

I theorized that if the Roku thought it could connect to those IPs, it would work again. So, I went looking for the easiest way to just reroute those IPs to a local IP. Unsurprisingly, Google found me an on-point SNBForums thread, where someone had a similar problem and the same idea:

The only way to stop my main TV from performing certain shenanigans is to use the following:
View attachment 47642
So this takes any requests for Google's DNS and redirects them to my Raspberry Pi at 192.168.127.5
Not fully what the OP is looking for...

I tried the above, replacing the 192.168.*.* IP with my own router's LAN IP, and eureka! The Roku works, and ad-blocking works! And nothing on my local network should ever need to access those DNS servers instead of mine, so, I think I'm good again.

For now, until Roku figures out how to bypass this.

 

[vlord]

Or you could just set DNS director to redirect all DNS requests to your router and use AdGuardHome with the Adguard + Adaway + OISD Small block list and have little worry that Roku will keep up with the community block list. Having used Diversion for years, I finally switched over to AdGuardHome and haven’t looked back.

 

[FixItInPost]

Or you could just set DNS director to redirect all DNS requests to your router and use AdGuardHome with the Adguard + Adaway + OISD Small block list and have little worry that Roku will keep up with the community block list. Having used Diversion for years, I finally switched over to AdGuardHome and haven’t looked back.

As I mentioned in my original post, DNS Director did nothing to affect the Roku. So no, I can’t just do that. I tried.

 

[bennor]

Edit: Reread the OP's post. Wasn't clear from their post, until following the links in their post, that they used the the GUI's LAN > Route.

Have a Roku, not sure if it has gotten the same or similar update as the OP's, but it works fine with zero ads when using with Pi-Hole and blocking the Google DNS's via the LAN - Route setting. Example Setting (192.168.2.1 is the router IP):

An example internet posts explaining this method of blocking Google:
https://12vpx.com/docs/block-google-dns/asus
https://support.strongvpn.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046732134-Blocking-Google-Asus-Router
There are a number of posts here on SNBForums discussing the same method that can be found using the site search feature.

 

[RMinNJ]

Is it just the Roku on screen ads? I use nextDNS configured on the router for all dns ..it does a great job keeping the roku ad screen blank.

 

[vlord]

Is it just the Roku on screen ads? I use nextDNS configured on the router for all dns ..it does a great job keeping the roku ad screen blank.

Roku has hardcoded their DNS for a long time now, so I'm not quite sure what caused OP's Roku to be "bricked" but any solution to redirect DNS requests, like DNS Director + nextDNS, PiHole, Diversion, AdGuardHome, etc should continue to work.