I took note of something I configured long back while I was doing the migration of AdGuard Home server to my Raspberry Pi running OpenWrt. It had to do with some suspicious pings that my two TP-Link access points (formerly my routers) were making to tp-link.com, even though I disabled any such explicit setting for telemetry collection. I mean, it might not be anything nefarious (I dunno, internet availability check or NTP related perhaps?) but I am a bit pessimistic when it comes to these things.

So, I decided to add the following rule in my AdGuard Home dashboard’s Filters > Custom filtering rules page:

||tp-link.com^$client=192.168.0.50|192.168.0.51

That makes AdGuard Home block any DNS requests for tp-link.com domain/subdomain from those two IPs, which are bound to the access points.