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.

 

[Gary_Dexter]

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):

View attachment 60664

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.

Old post - apologies for resurrecting…!!

If running a RPi with AGH (or pihole), would you still enter the routers IP as the Gateway IP, or that of the RPi?

 

[bennor]

Old post - apologies for resurrecting…!!

If running a RPi with AGH (or pihole), would you still enter the routers IP as the Gateway IP, or that of the RPi?

Yes. What happens is the requests to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 should go no where (time out / be unreachable) when configured with the router's IP in the gateway field/drop down box.
Edit to add: Example ping from Windows PC showing 8.8.8.8 is unreachable attached.