I have a network-wide privacy setup for my home network that works beautifully until it doesn't. Pi-hole blocked trackers on my laptops and phones, but the same aggressive lists periodically break smart TVs, delay camera notifications, or leave a cloud-dependent bulb hanging off the internet. This left me in a loop of allowing one mysterious hostname, testing again, and repeating until the device came back online. So I decided to give my smart-home network its own DNS policy, and the constant tug-of-war disappeared overnight. Pi-hole blocks everything, including your smart bulb's will to live. Your phone can show an error, your bulb just silently gives up. The problem wasn't DNS blocking itself. DNS-level filters are excellent for devices that cannot run browser extensions or privacy apps, as a resolver can refuse to return an address for a tracking or malicious domain, stopping the connection before it starts. Pi-hole and AdGuard Home apply this protection across a network without requiring client software, which makes them rather useful when it comes to IoT devices. That said, you'll run into problems if you use one blanket policy for every device. My phone can tolerate strict blocklists because I can see an error, inspect the query log, and work around it. A smart bulb, however, cannot explain that its login endpoint, telemetry host, and command service sit behind related domains. If any of those domains is blocked, it just stops responding. Relaxing your filters for everything will get the device back online, but it weakens security for devices that benefited from the stronger blocklists in the first place. Your smart home gets its own DNS lane, and the chaos stops. Different devices, different policies, same hardware if you're lazy. My solution was to treat smart-home devices as a class of their own. They already live on an isolated 2.4 GHz network, so I assigned that network a dedicated DNS resolver. A separate physical server is optional here; another Pi-hole or AdGuard Home container, VM, or instance on existing hardware works just as well. The difference is the policy, not the service running it. The router's DHCP service advertises the IoT resolver only to clients on that specific network, while my trusted network continues using the stricter resolver. Pi-hole can also assign clients to groups with different lists and rules, so the same result is possible with one instance if the resolver can reliably identify each client. AdGuard Home also supports client-specific settings and domain-specific upstream resolvers. This separation gives you a sane default. Computers and phones keep aggressive ad, malware, and tracking protection while smart home devices get a smaller, security-focused blocklist in addition to explicit blocks for tested telemetry domains that don't break my devices. If a vendor endpoint is required for setup, authentication, notifications, or firmware checks, I allow it only on the IoT policy. I no longer have to punch a network-wide hole to revive one temperamental smart plug. Query logs finally matter when they're only about your gadgets. Find the one domain your smart plug needs, then stop guessing. The biggest hassle of this approach is that there's no universal blocklist you can download off the internet and use here. The domains you end up blocking will be specific to the smart devices you have around the house, so you're going to have to dig through the logs. The upside is that instead of searching 100 domains, you only have to find the one that breaks your device and block it. With this approach, you can ensure that your smart home network remains secure and your devices work as expected, without sacrificing privacy or security for your other devices.
