AdGuardHome High google.com queries from my AP

[vlord]

Trying to figure out what the source of this is on my AP which is running no addons, servers, etc. NTP is set to : pool.ntp.org and time.nist.gov. I moved the AP to a new IP and pinged the old IP just to make sure there were no conflicts and there isn't. Any suggestions on where to look?

 

[ColinTaylor]

It looks like Network Monitoring (Administration - System), DNS Query and Ping.

 

[vlord]

I thought that too but both of those are unchecked:

 

[ColinTaylor]

I thought that too but both of those are unchecked:

IIRC it doesn't matter whether they're unchecked. Tick the boxes to enable the fields, change them to something else, save, untick and save. See if the change is reflected in your log.

 

[vlord]

I enabled and then disabled both of those to see if it resolves the issue

 

[ColinTaylor]

I enabled and then disabled both of those to see if it resolves the issue

Asus changed the behaviour quite some time ago. The DNS query cannot be disabled regardless of the GUI setting. At least that's the case for router mode, maybe AP mode is different.

 

[vlord]

Thanks for your help. I've set them to be blank, so hopefully that resolves the issue. Never would have thought an unchecked box means "enabled".

 

[ColinTaylor]

Thanks for your help. I've set them to be blank, so hopefully that resolves the issue.

That probably won't help. This is exactly the reason Asus made this change, to stop people trying to disable it.

 

[SomeWhereOverTheRainBow]

Thanks for your help. I've set them to be blank, so hopefully that resolves the issue. Never would have thought an unchecked box means "enabled".

Adguardhome has a method to hide queries if you'd perform just to not see those queries filling up your log.

 

[vlord]

Good news is that I was able to kill the ping query to google. Bad news is that the dns query to dns.msftncsi.com persisted. I‘ve changed that to 127.0.0.1. Any ideas why Asus wants this permanently on? This article from Asus’s website is less than clear to me as to the rationale for having this permanently on.

 

[vlord]

Adguardhome has a method to hide queries if you'd perform just to not see those queries filling up your log.

I do this for a few of the more chatty queries already. I was just really surprised with the amount of queries coming from my AP and couldn’t figure out why and where they were coming from. @ColinTaylor helped figure out the mystery but still a bit at a loss as to why Asus is forcing this on even when deselected.

 

[SomeWhereOverTheRainBow]

Good news is that I was able to kill the ping query to google. Bad news is that the dns query to dns.msftncsi.com persisted. I‘ve changed that to 127.0.0.1. Any ideas why Asus wants this permanently on? This article from Asus’s website is less than clear to me as to the rationale for having this permanently on.

From my understanding, it is their way of determining if the WAN is down. It serves a more crucial role for Dual Wan and Wan fail over implementations. Not to forget to mention, AdGuardHome is a single binary that runs in the background of the router, there is nothing to say the router won't randomly kill it. A watchdog script runs in the background to ensure DNS failures don't result in total DNS failure to your network; as well, the watchdog script checks to ensure adguardhome binary isn't "randomly" killed by the routers init. If Adguardhome experiences dns failure, the adguardhome binary itself will shutdown. While we cannot control how adguardhome is killed during normal router init operations, to some extent we can control how a "watchdog" script is killed. We can ensure the watchdog always is around to re-awaken adguardhome or restart adguardhome upon its own processes failure (and dns failure).