Samsung TV Apps won't open with PiHole on

General
1

I'm not exactly sure when this started happening, but Amazon Video, YouTube, and Plex all no longer work if PiHole is on.

What's really weird is that if I turn off the pihole for 30s, open each app once, they load correctly and then I turn the pihole back on, everything works fine until I put the TV to sleep. When it wakes up those apps no longer work again.

I do have auto app updates turned off to try and avoid the apps updating and then breaking, but it looks like they have have updated themselves anyways or something else happened.

What I don't understand is that when I check the PiHole logs when opening one of the problem apps, I don't see any blocked requests besides the ones from the TV itself to samsungcloudsolution (and it spams that 24/7 so nothing new there), so I can't figure out what it is that is causing this behavior. I'm just not sure how to go about debugging this and would appreciate any help.

3

The indications are that Pi-hole is blocking some element, but it may not be conspicuous in your logs. Use these tools to help determine why your desired content is being blocked; in particular tailing the Pi-hole log can be helpful.

1 Like
4

Apps does not work if you block cdn.samsungcloudsolution.com

5

I've had every samsung domain blocked ever since buying this TV and never had any issues until recently. Other apps like Netflix work fine so I'm a little skeptical that that domain is the problem.

6

Are You using Cloudflare DNS?
I had similar issues recently and for some reason I just tried OpenDNS and everything works just fine.
No idea what was wrong...

Just my 5¢

7

Are you able to log in to your Samsung account on your TV? Mine won't let me log in saying problems with reaching Samsung servers. Turned off Cloudflare and still the same. But apps like BBC iplayer and Amazon video are working fine.

8

Unfortunately, switching to OpenDNS didn't work (I was using Cloudflare).

I've been looking at the logs as was suggested above, and in the case of Plex, I can't find anything wrong. It's querying plex.tv and getting forwarded, so I'm not sure what is the issue here.

Mar 21 14:12:56 dnsmasq[21500]: query[A] plex.tv from 192.168.2.1
Mar 21 14:12:56 dnsmasq[21500]: forwarded plex.tv to 1.0.0.1
Mar 21 14:12:56 dnsmasq[21500]: dnssec-query[DS] plex.tv to 1.0.0.1
Mar 21 14:12:56 dnsmasq[21500]: reply plex.tv is no DS
Mar 21 14:12:56 dnsmasq[21500]: validation result is INSECURE
Mar 21 14:12:56 dnsmasq[21500]: reply plex.tv is 99.80.242.242
Mar 21 14:12:56 dnsmasq[21500]: reply plex.tv is 99.80.231.223
Mar 21 14:12:56 dnsmasq[21500]: reply plex.tv is 99.81.213.165

I've also tried disabling DNSSEC, never forward non FQDN and never forward reverse lookups, but even with all 3 disabled it still says plex is not reachable on the TV

9

Any update to this issue of logging into Samsung account on the Samsung TV? I'm having the exact same issue. Whitelisting samsungcloudsolution.com didn't resolve the issue.

10