Kevin knew the culprit. Not a virus. Greed.
His wife said, “That weird pop-up is gone.”
He saw one query from his own phone: reddit.com . Allowed. Followed by: redditmedia.com . Allowed. Followed by: google-analytics.com . Blocked.
He reduced the cache size. Turned off query logging. Set the upstreams to Cloudflare via DNS-over-TLS. adguard home asus merlin
Then he looked at his router. The humble ASUS RT-AX86U. On the side, a tiny USB port.
AdGuard Home is running on port 3000
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!”
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.
“It’s not the router,” he said. “It’s the wizard inside.” Kevin knew the culprit
But Merlin held. The UI loaded. Then came the Entware installer. The command line. The slow crawl of:
But lately, peace was a myth.