I Caught My UGREEN NAS Phoning Home To China - Here's The Fix

Your UGREEN NAS is quietly using a DNS server in China that it never shows you in the settings, and it phones home to UGREEN's cloud every few minutes. In this video I show you how to catch it red-handed, lock your NAS down, and turn it into a private, self-hosted server you actually control. I genuinely like UGREEN hardware. It's a great value and the interface is really user friendly. I just don't love some of the things UGOS does behind your back, so here is how to fix them. I am not sponsored by UGREEN. What you'll learn: How to disable UGREEN's telemetry and remote access How to SSH in and SEE the hidden Chinese DNS for yourself How to block UGREEN's phone-home with Pi-hole How SparkBox sets all of this up automatically, and turns your NAS into a full self-hosted app server (Pi-hole, Immich, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, a full media / arr stack, and more) with one command About that hidden Chinese DNS, what it actually means: A DNS server is the internet's phonebook. Your NAS asks it for the address of every site and service it connects to. UGOS had your NAS set to use 114DNS, a public DNS service in Shanghai, China, and hid it from the settings screen. That means a service in China could log which domains your NAS looks up and the home IP they come from. To be fair and accurate: that is connection metadata (a record of what you connect to), not your files or passwords, because DNS can't see those. The real problem is that it was set up without your knowledge or consent, on a device you bought to keep your data private. Separately, the NAS also phones home to UGREEN's own cloud with device info like its serial number and location. That is a different channel. SparkBox blocks both. SparkBox is free and in open beta. One command installs a clean dashboard on your NAS or any Linux box and lets you self-host the apps you would otherwise rent, with Pi-hole pre-configured to block UGREEN's telemetry out of the box. Get SparkBox: https://tomsparkbox.com Join the community (questions, help, feature requests): https://demox.world/d/sparkbox The UGREEN NAS I'm using (Amazon affiliate): https://amzn.to/49VWgt6 (mine is out of stock lol) Surfshark VPN, what I use for the media / arr stack (87% off + 4 months free): https://get.surfshark.net/aff_c?offer... Some links above are affiliate links. They support the channel at no extra cost to you. If this helped, subscribe. Next video I'm turning the UGREEN NAS into a torrent and arr-stack powerhouse. CHAPTERS: 0:00 Is your UGREEN NAS a Chinese honeypot? 0:58 Step 1: Disable UGREEN telemetry 1:10 Disable remote access (use Tailscale instead) 1:45 The shady part: a hidden Chinese DNS 2:39 Proof: SSH in and see it for yourself 3:40 Block it with Pi-hole 4:22 Auto-block it with SparkBox 5:18 SparkBox running on the UGREEN NAS 5:40 The media / arr stack 6:33 Tom Spark AI (supporter perk) 7:04 The community 7:32 How to install SparkBox 9:12 Recap + what's next