How To Stop DNSMasq from listening on all IPs/Interfaces and allow only localhost

Some people find it less than intuitive to do on DNSMasq and by default DNSMasq is available on 0.0.0.0 which could even be your LAN or Public IP.

Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name    
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:53              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2139/dnsmasq   

How do we fix it so DNSMasq listens on localhost only?

The default that most will do is edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf and then set this

listen-address=127.0.0.1

But all that is needed is actuallly the "bind-interfaces" option and in fact if you don't have that option, it will still listen on 0.0.0.0 which may not be what you want.

Note that even interface= will not help, especially if you don't have the bind-interfaces option as we show below.

So just add this to /etc/dnsmasq.conf

bind-interfaces

Then restart dnsmasq and check:

ctive Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name    
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:53            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      2230/dnsmasq        


Tags:

dnsmasq, ips, interfaces, localhostsome, intuitive, default, lan, ip, active, connections, servers, established, proto, recv, pid, tcp, listens, localhost, edit, etc, conf, actuallly, quot, bind, interface, restart, ctive,

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