His wife said, “That weird pop-up is gone.”
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.” adguard home asus merlin
He clicked
He reduced the cache size. Turned off query logging. Set the upstreams to Cloudflare via DNS-over-TLS. His wife said, “That weird pop-up is gone
/tmp/home/root# opkg install adguardhome
He exhaled.
Kevin knew the culprit. Not a virus. Greed.
Green. Green. Green.
He saw one query from his own phone: reddit.com . Allowed. Followed by: redditmedia.com . Allowed. Followed by: google-analytics.com . Blocked.
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. “It’s the wizard inside