Switched my router DNS to a family filter and suddenly 40% of my smart home stopped talking

I have a bunch of cheap Wyze cameras and plugs around the house, all on the same network. Last weekend I got fed up with the kids stumbling onto weird sites so I set up a free DNS filter from OpenDNS on my router. Almost immediately my thermostat app wouldn't connect, my garage door opener showed offline, and three of my cameras went dark. Took me two hours of poking around to realize the filter was blocking the servers those devices phone home to. Has anyone else had a privacy tool break their own setup like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

keith_bennett9d ago

China? That's wild. Can't believe that stuff goes straight overseas.

shane_hayes8d ago

That's a good question but what kind of data are those bulbs even sending back to China? Is it just basic usage stats or something more like listening for voice commands or tracking when you're home? I've wondered if these companies get around privacy laws by sending it overseas where nobody can touch them. Seems like a lot of trust to put in a lightbulb.

keith_bennett9d ago

OpenDNS is notorious for that. Their blocklists are wide and they don't always tell you what they're blocking. You can log into your account and whitelist the domains those devices use, but you have to catch each one as it fails. I had the same thing with a couple of smart bulbs - they were phoning home to some server in China and the filter killed the whole connection. Ended up ditching the filter and just running Pi-hole on a spare computer instead, gives you way more control over what gets blocked.