His son’s tablet was loading Roblox so slowly that the avatar T-posed for thirty seconds. His smart fridge had started showing banner ads for diet soda every time he opened the door. Worst of all, his wife’s work laptop—supposedly secure—kept redirecting her to fake “Microsoft Alert” pop-ups.
He reduced the cache size. Turned off query logging. Set the upstreams to Cloudflare via DNS-over-TLS.
Green. Green. Green.
Every device on Maple Street was screaming into the void: “What’s the IP for doubleclick.net? Where is taboola.com? Please, I need more ads!”
The web interface loaded. Dark theme. Graphs. He configured the router’s DHCP to hand out the router’s own IP as the DNS server. Every device on the network—smart bulb, doorbell, iPad, PlayStation—would now ask the router for permission to resolve a domain. adguard home asus merlin
He saw one query from his own phone: reddit.com . Allowed. Followed by: redditmedia.com . Allowed. Followed by: google-analytics.com . Blocked.
Then he blocked the big ones: doubleclick.net , facebook.com/tr , smart-fridge-telemetry.vendor.net . His son’s tablet was loading Roblox so slowly
He never looked at a Raspberry Pi again. Asuswrt-Merlin and AdGuard Home had become the silent, tireless guardian of Maple Street—filtering the noise, blocking the trackers, and letting the family get back to what mattered: ignoring each other peacefully while streaming in 4K.