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Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.

Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!

For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".

So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.

Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.

So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".

Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.

But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.

Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.

I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".

Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.

My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)

The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.

Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.

Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.

Comments
  • 2
    Better move to a smart tv from this era https://youtu.be/1K7TB1jpcc8
  • 0
  • 0
    Shoutout to Ingo on Stack.

    I was using the second ethernet off a Pi Zero hat hacked onto a Pi Four... so my solution ended up being a bit more weird, but this Stack Exchange answer is what got me started.

    https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/...
  • 3
    First rule of samsung tvs: Never feed a samsung tv after midnight or connect it to the internet.
  • 1
    Also, this is a bit bait and switch.

    I'm a little disappoint this wasn't an actual beowulf cluster 🤣
  • 4
    I have now messed around with all this linux command line networking shit I'm reading deep into the literal arch linux docs...

    What in the actual fuck have I done.
  • 2
    @HiFiWiFiSciFi aaaand he's now hooked on linux :)

    we've got him bois. Good job everyone.
  • 1
    Btw how did you set it up no not be visible by a router? As some l2 device? Then should at least appear in the arp listings..
  • 1
    @netikras TBH, I'm BRAND new at this, so I'm not sure if it will hide from ARP or really any of this. It DID hide from my DHCP list on my router, because running it that way prevents it from ever requesting an IP. And for that same reason it hid from "ip link show" ... but I honestly don't think I even tested it against arp or netstat...

    See the stack exchange thread I linked.

    I think it's down to commenting the lines for
    #[Network]
    #DHCP=yes

    In your bridge config file. So that the bridge between the two ethernet ports never requests an IP....?

    But yeah... if that's wrong I totally blame that Stack Exchange guy. And anyway... I took back OUT of hidden mode by having [Network] and DHCP=yes uncommented (and thus on) and also re-enabled WiFi because I wanted the Pi to have some other outside connections for SSH.
  • 0
    @HiFiWiFiSciFi that's a good link, thank you. Yes, it should hide your MITM device from the _router_, but I don't think it'll hide it from the _switch_ that router is built on. A bridge is an L2 device, which means it communicates by ethernet frames. And eth frames are incredibly simple: they have src_mac, dst_mac, type and data sections. That's all. And your RPI's NIC should be able to recognize the packets sent to it, meaning it must capture packets which have its MAC in the dst_mac section of the eth frame. Which means that a router must put that mac in the frame. I.e. the router should know your bridge's mac.

    I may be wrong though, haven't played with bridges a lot :)
  • 1
    Out oft curiosity: Isn't it easier to just disable the network capability on the "SmartTV"?
  • 0
    @sbiewald it's quite unclear what he wants to achieve. Maybe he still wants to keep it accessible in LAN?
  • 1
    Where is all the bandwidth going?
  • 0
    @Demolishun I still don't know!

    I mean, probably netflix and prime video and disney plus mostly...

    But I want numbers before I bring the hammer down.

    Actually, that gives me a good idea for a metric of measuring UDP vs TCP... that would give me a reasonably close "this is streaming" and "this is other internet use"... I think.
  • 2
    @HiFiWiFiSciFi Way back when I used to have to adjust my netflix video size to reduce bandwidth. I have no idea of these fuck tard movie streaming places have any kind of control like this anymore. You would think they would give that kind of control for people who have issues with stuttering videos. There is no reason to download a 4k resolution video on a smaller res device either.
  • 0
    Euuuh.

    Why just not to unplug network cable and disable wifi on TV ?

    Seems faster.

    And on personal note : I still don't get WHY people put TVs on network ? Like EVER ?

    Just buy a device (Or build your self with Pi) to stream content. All you need is an HDMI input, all other "Smart Tv functions" are completly useless
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