less than 1 minute read

For some obscure reason the Home Assistant folks decided to add fallback DNS functionality to the Homeassistant Supervisor. This meant that it would fall back to using Cloudflare’s DNS servers if/when the DNS servers you regularly use weren’t responding or acting weird. That was done with good intent, but it is a breach of privacy, trust and giving up a part of local control - something Home Assistant stands for.

What was even more annoying is that this functionality was - in my opinion - fairly broken. It was constantly trying to reach out to Cloudflare, even when your own DNS was fine, causing a lot of useless traffic. If you - like I do - then would block outside DNS servers (both DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS using blocklists) this resulted in quite a lot of useless processing by the firewall.

This -bug-feature sparked numerous GitHub issues and discussions in the forum, and a feature request. In version 2022.05.0 of the supervisor an option was finally introduced to disable the fallback dns.

To stop Home Assistant from hammering away to get to Cloudflare, issue:

$ ha dns options --fallback=false

and all is well.

Comments

You May Also Enjoy

Lenovo Thinkpad T14s Gen3 (AMD)

3 minute read

10 years ago I bought a Dell XPS13 L322x ultrabook as a replacement for my white Macbook 2,1. This week I replaced the Dell with something newer: a Lenovo Thinkpad T14s Gen3 (AMD).

Using Hetzner Storageboxes as backup targets for Restic/Rclone

2 minute read

For my offsite backup strategy I’m relying on rclone and restic. Rclone is being used to encrypt/copy backups taken by Proxmox Backup Server (which takes backups of the VM’s/Linux Containers running on Proxmox VE, deduplicates and compresses the data) to remote storage, while restic is used to do deduplication/encryption and copying of data stored on my NAS to remote storage.

Installing Displaylink drivers on Fedora 37

1 minute read

I have an Asus ZenScreen MB16AC which uses Displaylink as its display technology. On usb-c you can just plug this in and it’ll work, but on my ancient laptop I only have usb-a ports. The display does come with an USB-A to USB-C convertor - so let’s try ;)

Increasing Mastodon’s post size

less than 1 minute read

Mastodon comes with a default post size of 500 characters. This is not set in stone, and can be increased fairly easily (last tested on Mastodon 4.0.2):