libvirt's website has instructions on how to run dnsmasq alongside their instance
of dnsmasq.   The trick is to add a 'bind-interfaces' in the dnsmasq.conf and to
explicitly specify the listening address or interface.



On 06/24/2016 10:12 AM, Mark Stodola wrote:
> On 06/24/2016 09:48 AM, Ken Teh wrote:
>> I was trying to set up dnsmasq and discovered it's already running.
>> Apparently as part of libvirt.  Why is libvirt started?  What starts it?
>>
>> I tried looking through systemd output but the only thing about systemd
>> that I can understand are its services.  Everything else is so far
>> gobbledy-gook.
>
> I ran into this recently on my Fedora laptop.  It was quite annoying/frustrating to find out about this default configuration.  I issued a 'systemctl stop libvirtd' and 'systemctl disable libvirtd' to disable it.  It is used for the virtualization system, which relies on dnsmasq for the virtual lan these days...  It uses an alternate configuration file than the normal /etc/dnsmasq.d/ files or wherever they live these days.  Aft4r that, I as able to configure it as I normally do and start it using 'systemctl start dnsmasq'.
>
> If you rely on it for virtualization, you probably have to go fiddle with libvirtd's alternate dnsmasq config files to add the options you need for other purposes.  This wasn't the case for me.