@FlyBoy72 

 

If you have your Router cloud enabled (logged in or registered against the TP Link Account) this will need to heartbeat to the cloud server. 

 

This has been mentioned before on the business server forum and the user blocked this traffic and locked himself out of his own router..

 

I cant remember the exact addresses at moment, but pretty sure there was 2 of them

 

@Philbert 

 

Thanks for the post.  However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as Router Cloud on these units.  I have gone through every option I can find and see nothing like that or anything which would cause this action.  

 

I have blocked the address on the Pi-Hole and it seems to have no effect on the working of the router.  It's just annoying to see all those DNS attempts cluttering up the screen.

I found the TP-Link Cloud Function. It is under BASIC rather than Advanced setup. However, it is turned off.

@FlyBoy72 

 

That will be the one.  Even though its not logged in your side it will likely ping the cloud server incase you ever do decide to register the device with your cloud account probably just doing heartbeats.   I know Ubiquiti and DLink do the same even if they are not enabled for their appropiate clouds. 

 

If you think necessary you could block the traffic and use local only, I cant foresee any reason that blocking this could cause issues for you.    The joys of the world of IOT! 

@FlyBoy72 

 

Beside the TP-Link Cloud service, the router does something to determine whether or not there is a connection to the Internet, which it then indicates by the status of a LED (orange/green).

 

Of course I don't actually know how they make that determination, but I think the easiest way would be to try to contact a known server on the Internet (in this case tp-link.com would seem natural) and check for a response.