Crazy amount of DNS look ups

[fishface]

I have 12 Amcrest, mixed bunch, and all seem to be doing excessive DNS queries to amcrest

IP2M-841B, seem to be the worse, but the IP5M-T11179EW and the AD110 also do it.

The big query is config.amcrestcloud.com, in 4 days I have nearly 40,000 queries, which seems crazy high.

P2P is disabled, as is nearly everything else as I use them with BlueIris, all are hard wired and WiFi also disabled.

I can mitigate this somewhat, the DNS field is set to the Pihole, so they get blocked, but the firmware will not allow me to set a random gateway on a different subnet - I could get around this by reserving a fixed IP on the same subnet, with no device/hosts so it's like going to /dev/null, but ideally I would like to lower the amount of queries.

I've also networked filtered from LAN to WAN as well.

How can I reduce the amount of queries?
Any other way to fool it?
Why are there so many queries?

[jack7]

So many queries may be because you are blocking them.  Normally Amcrest Cloud queries are only done for two hours after camera power up, according to this article:

https://support.amcrest.com/hc/en-us/ar ... ctionality

[fishface]

Thanks for the info.

If you do not set up your Amcrest Cloud within 2 hours, the signal will stop.

So, they have been up for more than 2 hrs (at least 4 days), so why are they still trying?

P2P is disabled, i.e. I disabled it after reboot.

So should I try unblocking for a little while, and then block it?

Any idea what information it's sending to the Amcrest cloud?

Side note - this link is broken https://support.amcrest.com/hc/en-us/ar ... est-Cloud-

[AndyRH]

I saw the same thing. One of the things I have done is set the DNS to NULL or 0.0.0.0 on the cameras that allow it, others get a black hole address. I also isolated the cameras and block all traffic off the VLAN. I am sure they are still going nuts...
If you allow it to resolve and contact the web site the number of queries will be low, but I have no idea what it is sending with ALL the options off. There needs to be an option labeled "Do Not Call Home" and it needs to work.