Difficulty with Networking Within Qubes / PfSense Qube

User Support General
1

I’m having difficulty trying to figure out and understand how the networking within qubes works. I am trying to setup a pfSense Qube as a Firewall. I have read the guides and tutorials of other users about networking and one about setting up a successful pfSense Qube and I am stuck. I am able to create the pfSense Qube and I follow the installation instructions but I cant get the networking to work. My confusion is probably due to my lack of expertise in networking even outside of Qubes OS.

The sys-firewall qube to me right now in my mind doesnt actually do anything on my setup because to me it seems like if I want to set it up properly I have to go in and manually find the IP address range of every single website I might use and manually allow that IP address and then use a default deny on every single other website and it just seems like a whole lot more work than it is worth for my level of knowledge and my own risk threshold. I don’t have top secret intelligence nor am I a corporate espionage spy nor a wikileaks investigator. I’d rather use a program like pfSense which has a good reputation and I can integrate something like Suricata with it to have a decent protection setup for a general day to day use and just update it regularly and I will be fine. I’d also like to be able to setup my VPN that I use but as a generic user it just seems like a really daunting task as everything just seems like it’s very complicated to do having come from using MacOS and Windows 10/11.

Has anyone recently setup a pfSense Qube successfully that might be able to help me?

2

This is old but I will answer anyways. I had it working temporarily but I am not well versed with the setup of interfaces and VLANs even though I have done it several times. It turns out my router was confused and needed reboot.

I suggest before doing any of this, put pfsense on a normal hypervisor and practice setting up and clearing the interfaces and vlans (2 menu items) until you are good at it.

  • Shut down sys-net
  • Remove the net devices from sys-net
  • Add the net devices (wifi, eth) to your pfsense vm while off.
  • Start your pfsense VM and go through the wizard to try setting up VLAN and eth as suggested above.

Also you should assign your wifi device to the VM, this is not necessary for ethernet and no device shows up for it.