Dom0 remote access: serial and disk unlock

after running qubes for ~11 years in a workstation context, i’m interested to know if it is possible to configure qubes to run as a headless server with remote access. given the way dom0 is setup without network access, i infer this may not be feasible.

i have experience using serial console to unlock encrypted disks for other oses on remote, but have never done it with qubes. my goal would be to unlock the disk and then access dom0 on remote for this configuration.

the approach i have used successfully with other oses is to set the boot console to redirect to serial, use a serial port adapter to connect to the console, and then unlock the disk. i can access the running os via ssh after that.

You’ll want to check this out: https://neowutran.ovh/qubes/articles/homeserver.pdf

Specifically, server-admin-vm configuration. As far as LUKS-decrypting your Qubes install, I believe your serial set-up should also just work.

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The link throws me an ssl cert error. For you too?

Yes, but I still opened the PDF in a disposable VM :wink:

In chapter 2 the author states the following:

2 Rant, security and choices

2.1 TLS

For TLS certificates, the alternative to trusting every government and big company would be, like in a non-IT world,
to trust only peoples you actually have a good reason to trust. For that reason I created my own certificate authority
to generate all the certificate I need from my own root CA, so that people who have reason to trust me can trust my
root CA. However, for everyone else, using any so ware, it will trigger a warning/error saying that this certificate is not
trusted and that you should not continue.

I want to simultaneously have a valid certificate for peoples trusting [every government and big company on the planet]
and peoples trusting only me for my own website/services.

...

HTH.