Fedora 36 - Docker - Cannot connect to the Docker daemon

Question

OS: Fedora 36

I noticed this when my docker containers stopped working out of the blue. Fedora said the docker-compose stopped working. After system updates and a restart, I did the following:

sudo service docker start

Which worked, as I then did sudo service docker status

redirecting to /bin/systemctl status docker.service
● docker.service - Docker Application Container Engine
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/docker.service; disabled; vendor p>
     Active: active (running) since Wed 2022-09-14 10:29:01 MDT; 1s ago
TriggeredBy: ● docker.socket
       Docs: https://docs.docker.com
   Main PID: 2778 (dockerd)
      Tasks: 22
     Memory: 114.0M
        CPU: 347ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/docker.service
             └─ 2778 /usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// --containerd=/run/containerd/con>

Sep 14 10:29:00 fedora dockerd[2778]: time="2022-09-14T10:29:00.385376990-06:00>
Sep 14 10:29:00 fedora dockerd[2778]: time="2022-09-14T10:29:00.439821904-06:00>
Sep 14 10:29:00 fedora dockerd[2778]: time="2022-09-14T10:29:00.696795461-06:00>
Sep 14 10:29:00 fedora dockerd[2778]: time="2022-09-14T10:29:00.839972916-06:00>
Sep 14 10:29:00 fedora dockerd[2778]: time="2022-09-14T10:29:00.895624616-06:00>
Sep 14 10:29:00 fedora dockerd[2778]: time="2022-09-14T10:29:00.994809032-06:00>
Sep 14 10:29:01 fedora dockerd[2778]: time="2022-09-14T10:29:01.017873180-06:00>
Sep 14 10:29:01 fedora dockerd[2778]: time="2022-09-14T10:29:01.018007624-06:00>
Sep 14 10:29:01 fedora systemd[1]: Started docker.service - Docker Application >
Sep 14 10:29:01 fedora dockerd[2778]: time="2022-09-14T10:29:01.035944310-06:00>

So I can see it is working, it is running. I ran this again five minutes later, same result.

Next I ran docker ps -a and got:

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///home/XXXXX/.docker/desktop/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?

Which is odd, so next I checked who owns the docker.sock:

sudo ls -la /var/run/docker.sock

srw-rw---- 1 root docker 0 Sep 14 10:29 /var/run/docker.sock

For some reason its owned by root, so I decided to change it my user:

sudo chown XXXXX:docker /var/run/docker.sock

Now it shows as me: XXXXX:docker - blanked out user name:

srw-rw---- 1 XXXXX docker 0 Sep 14 10:29 /var/run/docker.sock

Now we stop and start again, as above. As above it is also running after doing sudo service docker status

Now if I try and do docker ps -a I still get:

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///home/XXXXX/.docker/desktop/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?

I have googled, and I have searched, but I am so confused, docker is running - but apparently it's not running?

How do I fix this?

The only thing I can think of is blowing away docker completely and re-installing, but that seems drastic.

Every where I look its:

Make sure its running - check
Change owner/group of of the sock file - done
restart docker - done
Check status - done

Another thing that I stumbled upon was:

sudo dockerd

Which gave me a bunch of output but at the end it was:

failed to start daemon: error while opening volume store metadata database: timeout

Fedora 36 - Docker - Cannot connect to the Docker daemon

0 Answers