You Know What Part

"Let us think the unthinkable, Let us do the undoable, Let us prepare to grapple with ineffable itself, And see if we may not eff it after all." Douglas Adams

What is that noisy IoT device on my network?

That’s the first question that popped up when I installed AdGuard Home on my Raspberry Pi last night. Within minutes, hundreds of queries went out for these two domains:

  • xx.ott.io.mi.com
  • xx.ot.io.mi.com

What is mi.com, you ask. It is Xiaomi’s US website. I don’t (or thought I didn’t) have an Xiaomi device on my network because, wel, I’d never bought a Xiaomi device.

Except, it turns out, someone in my household did. It’s just not sold as a Xiaomi device. It’s a vacuum, specifically a Roborock S4. That robot sits idle for 2-3 days, does 45 minutes of work, then goes idle again. And when it’s idle, tucked away under a bench, charging it’s little battery and complaining on the app about dirty filters, it’s pinging those two addresses 119,000 times a day.

I mean come ON

That screen shot was taken 24 hours after I set up AdGuard and blocked those two domains. Around 16 times a minute, every minute of every hour of every day.

So, if you’re seeing crazy traffic on your network and need a place to start, look for down-market IoT devices that may have borrowed tech from Xiaomi.

If you have AdGuard, the custom filtering rules you want are:

||xx.ott.io.mi.com^$important
||io.mi.com^$important

If you’re there adding those, toss in this one for your noisy Rokus as well.

||logs.roku.com