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.

Recent VM/Emulation Adventures:

The goal was to get TCP/IP and SSH running on whatever weird VM/emulated machine, and connect to the chatroom at chat.tcp.direct successfully.

Longhorn, somewhere late pre-reset: Crashes right after installer begins "Starting Windows", 0x7b from sum-match ISO. Fail.

TempleOS (well, Shrine, but y'know): Dear god. No. No, I am not writing SSH in HolyC myself *fuck that,* fail.

Slackware: oh ffs i gotta use fdisk to partition this damn thing? and it's not even the good fdisk? Oh, wait... it hangs. Fail.

WinME: shockingly, was *fairly* stable... until it hung up WASAPI and the hypervisor two frames into desktop rendering. Fail.

Mac OS 7: First-boot after install, immediate unknown trap. Just works, eh? Fail.

Amiga: After about 85 resets and 7 hours of constant fighting with WinUAE, I finally got TCP/IP working. (Required 10MB of total RAM and an FPU to connect.) Success!

Win98FE: just... PuTTY and done. Easy. (This was the warmup.) Success...

Other people's achievements so far:

- Minecraft using the new QEMU interface mod thing.
- Hacked smart fridge.
- iPhone, from custom initramfs.