SwizzleStick

At that point I would expect control of it, or at least for it to respect the configuration it is given. If neither are true, then it just doesn’t go online at all. If that’s part of the main function, then I find an alternative or live without it.

Nothing on the inside should be sending anything to the outside that can’t be inspected before it leaves, with the exception of stuff that is directly driven by a human (guests browsing, etc).

This is the best way, really. Generally, you have much more control over what you plug into it.

A display shouldn’t have anything even approaching what can be called an ‘OS’ on it. Yet here we are.

Sometimes even that’s not enough. I’ve had some questionable kit before that would just ignore the DNS settings fed to it if it thought they were no good, and fall back to something else preconfigured.

pfSense is a wonderful tool for situations like that. Anything intended for local use only here just doesn’t get outside at all. Handy for stuff like a fire stick that only needs to be calling up a local media library.

It can also mangle any DNS requests going out to a different server and redirect them to itself instead. You could do this without it with iptables/nftables on a generic Linux box, but pfSense makes it much friendlier.

There are other packages that can do the same, but physically all you need is one piece of hardware as a bouncer that manages connections between inside/outside.

I usually get up by 5. If breakfast isn’t out by 6, I will certainly know about it.

They are a useful backup to have.