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:

  1. I came home at 3pm from the city, my internet at home didnt work.
  2. checked multiple devices, phones worked out of wifi, I figured I need to restart the router
  3. I login to the router and it responds totally normal but my local network doesnt. (Its always dns, I know)
  4. I check the router log and see 100s of login attempts over the past couple of days.
  5. I panic and pull the plug, try to get into my server by installing an old monitor, works, many errors about dns
  6. Wife googles with her phone, seems I had https login from outside on and someone found the correct port, its disabled now
  7. Obviously, local network still down, I replug everything and ssh into the server which runs pihole as dns
  8. pihole wont start dns, whatever I do
  9. I use history and find I "chmod 700"ed the dns mask directory instead of putting it in a docker volume…
  10. I check the pihole.log, nothing
  11. I check the FTL log, there is the issue
  12. 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.