Amazon Fire Stick and AdBlock

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I have an Amazon firestick on my network, which is managed by a router running OpenWRT 18.06.1 with the adblock package installed and activated. Recently, it has started reporting that it can't connect to the internet after a number of hours of connecting just fine.

When this happens:

  • the firestick reports that it is connected to the Wifi, but has no internet access.
  • other devices remain able to reach the internet
  • disabling adblock immediately results in the firestick re-connecting

So, it looks like the firestick decides it's not connected to the internet when it can't reach a service which is being blocked by adblock, and I need to whitelist the corresponding address. How can I work out which addresses I need to whitelist?

I have enabled debug logging for adblock, but that doesn't log blocked addresses, sadly.

2

Do you use the adguard blocklist source? If so, please use this fixed regex for adguard: Adblock support thread

1 Like
3

I do use adguard, so I will try that config.

Before trying that, I had enabled logging in the dhcp/dns service, and am seeing lots of entries like this for the firestick IP:

Sat Nov 10 10:00:42 2018 daemon.info dnsmasq[21974]: 1844 192.168.2.135/35481 query[A] spectrum.s3.amazonaws.com from 192.168.2.135
Sat Nov 10 10:00:42 2018 daemon.info dnsmasq[21974]: 1844 192.168.2.135/35481 config spectrum.s3.amazonaws.com is NXDOMAIN

so I added spectrum.s3.amazonaws.com and amazonaws.com to the whitelist, but weirdly that didn't change the outcome. Is the whitelist enabled by default? Am I using it wrongly?

4

I can confirm that the updated adguard regex seems to fix the problem! Thanks. Any chance of that being pushed as an updated to the package?

I am still wondering why my whitelist entries didn't solve the problem though.

5

Yes of course, the fix is now in master and cherry picked in 18.06 branch, too.