#PiHole – ✅ Enable self.events.data.microsoft.com if you use Office 📄 (and you probably are!)

Hi !

New house is in progress and that also means bring back PiHole running in a Raspberry Pi. If you don’t know PiHole, this may help:

Pi-hole or Pihole is a Linux network-level advertisement and Internet tracker blocking application which acts as a DNS sinkhole and optionally a DHCP server, intended for use on a private network. It is designed for low-power embedded devices with network capability, such as the Raspberry Pi, but supports any Linux machines.
PiHole

I turned this on yesterday and after a few hours of use, I got more than 40% of blocked queries in my network.

pihole blocking more that 40 percent of queries

And one of the domains was going up fast in the top 3: self.events.data.microsoft.com

The domain is in one of the blocked url lists, however it seems to be crucial to work with office. The official documentation shares more details about this endpoint:

The following endpoints are used to connect to the Microsoft 365 admin center’s shared infrastructure, including Office in a browser. For more info, see Office 365 URLs and IP address ranges. You can turn this off by removing all Microsoft Office apps and the Mail and Calendar apps. If you turn off traffic for these endpoints, users won’t be able to save documents to the cloud or see their recently used documents.

Source: Manage connection endpoints for Windows 10 Enterprise, version 1903.

Similar behavior affects to the 2nd and 3rd endpoint, so I decided to enable them in PiHole. I’ll keep an eye on them, and let’s see how my home network works !

Happy coding!

Greetings

El Bruno

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4 responses to “#PiHole – ✅ Enable self.events.data.microsoft.com if you use Office 📄 (and you probably are!)”

Zfc

Aug 7, 2021 6:18 PM

Thank you I am unblocking as well

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Dave

Sep 22, 2021 6:34 PM

Were you seeing any issues with Windows or Office that led you to identifying the issue as the block of the self.events.data.microsoft.com or were you just investigating what the url is? I’m a remote Windows SysAdm that works a lot with O365 & Azure as well as being my wife’s tech support person (lol). I’ve seen no issues with performance with having that blocked. It’s actually my top blocked url in my house.

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1. elbruno
  
  Sep 22, 2021 6:47 PM
  
  Hi Dave.
  Somehow the web versions of Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, etc. didn’t work well unless I added that url to the allowed list.
  I didn’t dig much more about the issue.
  Regards
  
  LikeLiked by 1 person
  
  1. Dave Weimer
    
    Sep 23, 2021 1:08 PM
    
    I wonder if I’m not seeing it because we’re using various 3rd-party portals like okta to access them. I work for an MSP so we have multiple clients.
    
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