Pi-hole

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The Pi-hole® is a DNS sinkhole that protects your devices from unwanted content without installing any client-side software.

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Blocking Roku ads on my pihole (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by modus@lemmy.world to c/pihole@sh.itjust.works

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I have a pihole server on my network. It used to block the ads on my roku's homescreen and only empty placeholders would show up.

I bought a new Roku player and it doesn't seem to have any of the ads on the homescreen blocked by the pihole. Configuring the "secret menus" doesn't really do anything, as far as I can tell.

Does anyone have any updated methods for blocking ads on the Roku homescreen?

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[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 3 points 1 week ago (7 children)

As per a response I found on the orange site, try adding these block lists in pihole: https://github.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist

[–] modus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

I'll check them out. Thanks

Edit: Looks like they're working just fine. Exactly what I needed. Much thanks!

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

All good! I'm glad it was that. Initially I thought they might be doing tricky stuff with hard coding their DNS server but apparently not, just needed the right block list 🙂

[–] modus@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Welp... Looks like whatever I saw last night was just temporary. It's back to showing ads. I tried adding a few other random lists to no avail. I can tell it's hitting my Pi for the DNS lookup. I'm going to try and go through the logs and manually block ad-related domain lookups.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I can tell it’s hitting my Pi for the DNS lookup.

This is a good sign!

I don't have a Roku so can't help at that level, but this site mentions some domains to block and also a secret menu that lets you remove ads: https://appuals.com/block-ads-roku-tv/

[–] modus@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Alright, I went nuclear and blocked almost all DNS lookups by my roku. Almost any requests for a roku domain are now blocked. If something gets broken I'll undo it, but so far, so good.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 9 hours ago

Nice! You should also be able to use the pihole logs to check which domains it's hitting if you need to loosen it later.

[–] modus@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Yeah, I've never had success with the secret menu configuration. Most of it is cryptic to me. I appreciate the support and I'm definitely going to keep trying. (I think I found some domains to block that seem promising but I'm not celebrating yet.)

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