I’ve been advised that I should consider installing the CLI on my router as I become more comfortable with these DNS services. Anyone here have the CLI installed on their routers? Was it easy to install? How does the CLI handle device names? Is it automatically assigned? If I don’t like the device names, how do I manually change it?
Thanks!
CLI on your routers? Where did you hear this? I’m confused what and how you mean here 
Am I missing something?
Ah, I see how you mean. But you can just as well use NextDNS in your routers firmware without the CLI. I honestly how CLI on the router would even work.
At least on some routers you can access a CLI. On mine it is an embedded stripped down Linux shell that looks very much like bash. I use it for doing some odd ball stuff in ways that I can script rather than setting those items up via the webUI.
But you may not need to go that deep into the weeds to setup your router to use an alternative DNS service. I set up my router to use NextDNS by simply using the router’s web UI. There are, at least on Asuswrt-Merlin, some seldom used fields on the setup page that allow me to set things up like NextDNS likes to access my paid NextDNS block list configuration, etc. and to log that the requests are coming from my home (vs my phone, etc.).