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.

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