When NetworkManager takes over

ProtonVPN kinda broke my WireGuard config and took down dnsmasq

It’s always DNS. Well, kinda, but not really.

Symptoms

My WireGuard connection was working, but I wasn’t able to access my services.

# Everything was normal both on the client and on the server
sudo wg show

Hopping on to the server, I quickly discovered that dnsmasq wasn’t running and would not start.

sudo systemctl restart dnsmasq.service
Job for dnsmasq.service failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status dnsmasq.service" and "journalctl -xeu dnsmasq.service" for details.

# Relevant part of journalctl
journalctl -xeu dnsmasq.service
systemd-helper[6549]: dnsmasq: unknown interface wg0
dnsmasq[6549]: unknown interface wg0
dnsmasq[6549]: FAILED to start up

Finding out the issue

For reference, my server is running Ubuntu 24.04.