I know, I know, clickbaity title but in a way it did. It also brought in the situation in the first place but I’m just going to deliberately ignore that. Quick recap:
- I came home at 3pm from the city, my internet at home didnt work.
- checked multiple devices, phones worked out of wifi, I figured I need to restart the router
- I login to the router and it responds totally normal but my local network doesnt. (Its always dns, I know)
- I check the router log and see 100s of login attempts over the past couple of days.
- I panic and pull the plug, try to get into my server by installing an old monitor, works, many errors about dns
- Wife googles with her phone, seems I had https login from outside on and someone found the correct port, its disabled now
- Obviously, local network still down, I replug everything and ssh into the server which runs pihole as dns
- pihole wont start dns, whatever I do
- I use history and find I "chmod 700"ed the dns mask directory instead of putting it in a docker volume…
- I check the pihole.log, nothing
- I check the FTL log, there is the issue
- I return it to 777, everything is hunky dory again.
Now I feel very stupid but I found a very dangerous mistake by having my lan fail due to a less dangerous mistake so I’ll take this as a win.
Thanks for reading and have a good day! I hope this helps someone at some day.


Well I’m running Pihole in docker and don’t have 777 on anything.
Good for you. What permissions do you have on etc/dnsmasq.d if I may ask?
I don’t run Pi-hole but quickly peeking into the container (
docker run -it --rm --entrypoint /bin/sh pihole/pihole:latest) the folder and files belong to root with the permissions being755for the folder and644for the files.chmod 700most likely killed Pi-hole because a service that is not running as root will be accessing those config files and you removed their read access.Also, I’m with the guys above. Never
chmod 777anything, period. In 99.9% of cases there’s a better way.Thanks for checking that. I will change the permissions accordingly and restart pihole to check if it works. Probably later today.