Getting an app vm to access my home network – QUBES 4.3

General Discussion
1

So, first of all, networking is not my strong point.

I have a home network that has two networked media tanks (things to store tv shows and movies on) and a small home server. I primarily use a windows pc to transfer things that I download (to the media tanks) and things to and from my server. In reality the majority of this is handled by windows but there are times when a linux pc will want to go to the server for example.
I’ve always been able to get non-qubes linux pcs working but, despite many requests on linux forums and here I think, I have never received any instructions with regard to qubes that has worked.
What I want is to be able to do is access the home network from an app vm in qubes.
So, after cleanly installing qubes 4.3 I was just noodling around getting used to the newer gui etc and wondered if AI could help with my long standing quest to network a qube. Well, the answer is yes. It provided me with a very simple solution that works. This is what I did:

  1. Create a new app vm based on fedora that I called ‘home network’. Pretty innovative right there!
  2. I used the default settings that the qube was set up with (sys-firewall by default etc). AI gives a long winded explanation about how qubes networks etc but in the end the default settings were spot on.
  3. In the fedora template I installed:

*sudo dnf install gvfs gvfs-smb

sudo dnf install samba-client cifs-utils*

  1. Shut the template down, restart and then restart ‘home network’.
  2. Use samba (smb://etc) to connect to all of my devices (Thunar).
    It was as simple as that. Because the devices are not switched on all of the time I just bookmarked the shares’ addresses in Thunar and now they are accessible when they are on.

This problem has literally bugged me for years. I’m sure that some of the solutions that I have been offered in this time may have worked but were beyond my skill and understanding level so I couldn’t do it. The above has to be probably the most elegant solution I can imagine. Simple, easy to do and it works!

I’m also sure that some people will see this as someone (me) who couldn’t put two and two together from my previous successful linux networking, which may be true, but there may be others like me that struggle with networking.

I’m posting this just in case someone else is in the same boat and struggling to make this work. And with 4.3 just being released its topical for now.