Your Local DNS Filter Is Probably Being Bypassed Right Now — And You Don’t Even Know It

There’s a specific kind of satisfaction that comes from spinning up your own DNS filter. You install AdGuard Home. You load up carefully curated blocklists. You point DHCP at your resolver. You watch queries scroll by and think: I control my network now. Except you don’t. Not even close . That’s the punchline that hit hard. Devices quietly ignoring DHCP. A Google Home sending DNS straight to 8.8.8.8. Browsers tunneling DNS over HTTPS so your resolver never even sees the query. Android apps skipping hostname resolution entirely and connecting directly to hardcoded IPs. That blocked domain you were proud of catching? It might never have touched your DNS server. And once you realize that, the whole “I’ve locked down my network” story starts to wobble. ## The Illusion of Control The setup seemed airtight at first. AdGuard Home running locally. Blocklists active. Everything pointing at your DNS server. It feels centralized. Clean. Deterministic. Then reality creeps in. Hardcoded DNS servers. DoH on port 443. DoT on port 853. DoQ over UDP 853 . Encrypted queries sliding through the same port your normal HTTPS traffic uses. Apps embedding their own resolvers. Devices pretending your DHCP settings are more of a suggestion than a rule. And suddenly your resolver is just sitting there, unused. “Nobody asked me anything.” That’s the unsettling part. DNS filtering only works if clients actually use your DNS server. Once they don’t, your control collapses into theater. ## The Five-Layer Defense Instead of accepting defeat, the response was escalation. A five-layer defense built on OPNsense, AdGuard Home, and Unbound . It wasn’t just blocklists anymore. It was NAT redirects to force DNS queries back to the local resolver. Port blocks to shut down common encrypted DNS ports. HaGeZi’s DoH blocklist to identify known encrypted DNS endpoints. IP-level firewall rules to catch traffic trying to slip out directly. This wasn’t casual homelab tinkering. This was active containment. And even then, the word “all” had to be crossed out and replaced with “most” . Because nothing is ever fully locked down. ## “We’ve Got 8.8.8.8 at Home” The comments took on a life of their own. One of the most upvoted replies turned the whole situation into a meme: “We’ve got 8.8.8.8 at home” . Another chimed in: “You want 8.8.8.8? Sure, there is one right here just a couple of hops away” . This is where things get clever. If devices insist on talking to 8.8.8.8, fine — give them 8.8.8.8. Just make sure that IP actually lives inside your network. Some users described assigning 8.8.8.8/32 and 8.8.4.4/32 directly to the loopback interface of their router . Others suggested creating a VLAN with 8.8.8.8/30 and static routing it so the router sees it as a local next hop . It’s elegant. A little mischievous. And deeply satisfying. The device thinks it’s talking to Google. It’s actually talking to your resolver. Internet superhero energy, as one commenter put it . ## The Pushback: This Can Break Stuff But here’s where the tone shifts. Not everyone treats DNS redirection like a harmless trick. One user warned that using random public IPv4 addresses internally can sometimes break things . Another said redirecting traffic caused noticeable delays and interruptions for Google devices like Google Home and Chromecast . That’s the tradeoff. Forceful interception can create latency. Smart devices may retry aggressively. Some services expect to hit specific infrastructure and behave oddly when they don’t. And then there’s the nuclear option: blocking outgoing WAN traffic to 8.8.8.8 entirely . It sounds clean. Just deny it at the firewall. But encrypted DNS providers aren’t limited to a single IP. And once DoH hides inside regular HTTPS traffic, IP blocking becomes blunt and risky. Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth. ## Meta, CDNs, and the Limits of Blocking The original write-up didn’t pretend this was a perfect solution. It explicitly called out what it doesn’t catch . Meta bundles their DoH inside regular Facebook CDN infrastructure. That means blocking it cleanly without breaking Facebook and related apps is nearly impossible . And that’s the broader pattern. Encrypted DNS isn’t some fringe bypass. It’s becoming standard. Browsers default to DoH. Operating systems experiment with encrypted resolvers. Large platforms integrate DNS resolution tightly into their own traffic flows. The more encrypted and multiplexed everything becomes, the harder it is to surgically filter. You’re not just blocking DNS anymore. You’re potentially interfering with core app behavior. ## The Bigger Argument: Privacy vs Parental Control vs Autonomy Underneath the technical back-and-forth is a philosophical debate. Some people see encrypted DNS as an attack on local control. If you run a DNS filter for ad blocking, malware protection, or parental control, DoH feels like sabotage. Others see encrypted DNS as a privacy win. It prevents ISPs and local network operators from snooping on queries. From that angle, bypassing a local resolver isn’t malicious — it’s protective. And then there’s the practical crowd. They don’t care about ideology. They just want ads gone and devices stable. One commenter joked that by colocating DNS locally, we’re basically Internet superheroes, like Netflix placing caching servers at ISPs . Another quipped that we’re helping Google cut down peering data charges . It’s humor, but it masks a real tension: who should control DNS resolution? The device vendor? The browser? The ISP? The user? In a home lab, most of us answer: the user. The modern internet doesn’t always agree. ## The Fragility of “Default Secure” There’s something almost poetic about the idea that the more secure and private protocols become, the harder it is for you to enforce local policy. DoH hides DNS inside HTTPS. That’s great for preventing ISP-level surveillance. It’s terrible for local filtering unless you start inspecting TLS, which opens an entirely different ethical and technical can of worms. So you escalate. NAT rules. Firewall blocks. Redirects. IP tricks. Blocklists of known DoH endpoints . And still, you admit it only catches “most.” That honesty matters. Because the illusion of total control is more dangerous than the reality of partial control. ## What This Really Teaches If there’s one thing this whole saga exposes, it’s that DNS filtering is no longer a single-layer problem. Pointing DHCP at your resolver is table stakes. Modern devices treat that as optional. Browsers treat it as advisory. Apps sometimes ignore it entirely. If you want meaningful enforcement, you need network-level interception. Port control. IP awareness. Ongoing maintenance of DoH endpoint lists . And even then, you accept imperfection. The headline wasn’t clickbait. Your local DNS filter probably is being bypassed right now . Not because you did it wrong. Not because AdGuard or Unbound failed. But because the internet moved forward, and local DNS control didn’t stay the default. The real question isn’t whether bypasses exist. They do. The question is how much effort you’re willing to invest to reclaim control — and how much breakage you’re willing to tolerate in the process. Because locking down DNS in 2026 isn’t about installing a filter. It’s about deciding who really owns resolution on your network. And then fighting for it.