When running dnsmasq inside a VPS on an OpenVZ server, you may get an error while trying to start up dnsmasq (this is in particular the case for Debian):Starting DNS forwarder and DHCP server: dnsmasqdnsmasq: setting capabilities failed: Operation not permitted

This is because dnsmasq does not run as root (which is a good thing). What happens is that dnsmasq gets started as root, then attempts to set privileged functions to the dnsmasq user before changing user from root to that user. When setting these capabilities fails, you get the above error.

The reason for failing is usually because either the kernel is missing the required features, or, in case of OpenVZ, the permissions are not pas  ...