Large DNS request wave every hour?

Installation
1

Hello! Since using Pihole on my router’s DHCP server, i’ve noticed my home assistant instance has been making over 1,000 DNS requests to “e87.b.akamaiedge.net” and multiple PTR requests (ex: 152.71.168.192.in-addr.arpa, 207.71.168.192.in-addr.arpa, etc.).

I tried disabling some integrations to see what could be the cause of this (I initially thought it was Speedtest.net or Ring), though it kept happening. I tried just disabling the container altogether and that worked (image shows before and after stopping HA). Is there a process I can disable to stop those large waves of DNS requests?

Screenshot 2025-02-14 102138
Screenshot 2025-02-14 1021381471×352 19.5 KB

2

Reverse look up for local clients (for 192.168.71.152 and 192.168.71.207 in your case). :bulb:

3

How would I stop the reverse look ups and does this involve the auto discovery for devices? Also what about the akamaiedge.net domain?

4

Akamai is a big cloud/CDN provider. What cloud based integrations you got beside ring (which will upload your videos probably to the Amazon cloud and you gave them full rights to share footage without your explicit consent btw.) :video_camera:

1 Like
5

You read the IP addresses wrong.
They had to be read backwards for the in-addr.arpa domain.
That domain is reserved to lookup IP addresses to domain names, where normal lookups are domain names to IP addresses.

6

I don’t think any camera uploading happens with Ring from HA, though I also have radio browser, aurora visibility, Google Translate TTS, Xbox, and met.no. I have restarted my HA instance after disabling the cloud integrations, so I will update you on the outcome of that.

Also, is there a way to disable the in-addr.arpa lookup on HA, as it seems pointless if HA knows the IP addresses of devices I already configured.

7

But HA does not.
You DNS server does.

8

For an integration like Pihole, yes, it does when I specify the IP of the device running Pihole during the integration setup on HA. If anyone reading this knows how to stop these reverse IP lookup requests (in-addr.arpa) in Home Assistant please let me know, otherwise please ignore this thread.

So I disabled all the internet plugins and that solved the Akamai issue, though I’ll re-enable them one by one to see which causes those requests.

Update:
So the Xbox plugin requests the e87.b domain 9 times when I re-enabled it (with others like xsts_auth_xboxlive_com_akadns_net, xsts_auth_xboxlive_com, user_auth_xboxlive_com, and peoplehub_xboxlive_com), Radio Browser does not request the akamaiedge domain (only at1.api.radio-browser.info and _api._tcp.radio-browser.info), Ring doesn’t either (hits api_ring_com, mtalk_google_com, a92f83bba7a172eaf_awsglobalaccelerator_com, and multiple .amazonaws.com domains). I’m guessing it was due to the Xbox plugin, so I will be disabling it for the time being.

9

Amazon’s cloud like expected. :person_shrugging:

Correct, it is the other way: First your videos get transfered/saved to other people computers (AKA :cloud:) and just after that you/HA gets access :bulb:

If you are experiencing an internet outage and your Ring camera is no longer connected, your device will not record or save videos.
www.ring.com

If you look at the ha integration for ring you would know that it does not work locally but depends on the cloud for streaming/access “your” videos :grimacing:

1 Like
10

You might want to read through this thread. It talks a lot about this specific issue. This thread may help as well.