First off, thanks to everyone that provides help on these forums. I have used many responses as I have gone through the journey of setting up Qubes. Now to it:
I have Qubes installed and everything seems to be working properly except for my network connection. When I go into any qube, Firefox fails to find a connection, ping commands don’t work, etc etc.
Things that I see and know:
I am connected via ethernet to my router (but wifi also doesn’t work).
I have tested out Tails and Windows and the network connection works as expected.
My sys-net qube has my two network controllers attached as devices:
a) Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor, RTL8125 2.5Gbe Controller
b) Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor
c) Chipset: AMD , Mobo: X870E Aorus Elite Wifi7 Gigabyte
I see the red Network Manager in the top right and when I mouse over it says “No network connection”.
When I right click on Network Manager and click “Edit Connections” the window that displays is empty. I have tried creating an Ethernet connection here, but nothing seems to change.
Since my connection (both ethernet and wifi) work in Tails. Since it is debian based, I have tried using both Ubuntu and Debian for my sys-net template. I thought perhaps it could make a difference.
Linux kernel is 6.6.77-1.fc37
I have scoured the internet and the only thing I can think of is that my controller isn’t supported and needs to have drivers installed?
I would’ve checked in hopes for silly misconfiguration first:
Which qubes provide network to the Windows qube, Tails qube, and the qube that has no connection?
Are you sure that the network manager you see in the tray is running in sys-net?
Do you see network controllers in lspci of your sys-net?
Do you see interfaces in ip a of your sys-net?
If all this seems correct, check connectivity in the sys-net itself and then move up the network tree (e.g. sys-firewall, then sys-whonix, client qubes, etc.) until you find the culprit
I have tested the ethernet in Windows and Tails outside of QubeOS in standalone installations, not within qubes.
I’m not sure, how can I tell?
sys-net doesn’t have lspci but dom0 does and I See the 2 network interfaces.
yes, I see the loopback and a 10.x.x.x/32 ip interface
sys-net has no connectivity. I have tried via Firefox as well as trying to ping the local 192.168.1.1. The response from the ping is “Network is unreachable”
You can tell which qube given window belongs to by name in square brackets before title of the window.
Assuming your sys-net is still debian, lspci is provided by pciutils package.
It seems like your network qube doesn’t have any network devices attached to it, or fails to operate them. You should have device interfaces in ip a, not just loopback and virtual interfaces.
Are you sure you have these devices attached to sys-net?
It’s okay to have them in dom0’s lspci, as long as their kernel driver is pciback. You can check currently used drivers with lspci -k
Then yes, when i right click on network manager icon in the top right and open “edit connections” the window that appears is in the sys-net qube.
As far as i can tell, they are attached to sys-net. When I go to qube-manager, right click on sys-net, go to settings. Under the devices tab the two network devices are connected.
Unfortunately, I can’t apt install since I have no network connection
The interfaces within dom0 do have pciback and kernel driver in use.
I switched to fedora-based sys-net and lspci lists both the network controller and Ethernet controller successfully. The network still doesn’t work, though. Any other ideas?
I looked through journalctl but don’t see anything exceptional.
I appreciate the assistance. I’m going to keep poking at until someone else responds.
It’s strange because if I run “sudo journalctl -u NetworkManager” I see everything bootup and it finds the lo device and then says something like “new Ethernet device (/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/2” then “carrier: link connected”
So that sounds like it found and connected to my ethernet device…
Try to disconnect the pci device from the fedora based sys-net first before you attach it to the debian sys-net. You have to shutdown the vms first to do this. Then to make it simpler just use the gui and click on the vms settings to detach the pci device then attach accordingly.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work. I cloned the fedora sys-net qube, changed the clone to use debian, removed the devices from the fedora qube and add them to the debian qube and then started it up. I get the same result.
Funny thing is that after this failed, i went back to the original fedora sys-net qube and added the devices back (without removing them from the debian clone). Once I tried to start up the original fedora qube while the cloned debian qube was still running, it failed because the debian qube was using the devices.
So it knows it’s there and it is attached to them…but it’s just not working.
Maybe your network exhausted the DHCP server and ran out of IP addresses to hand out? If you use mac randomization this can happen. Try rebooting your network (unplug it for at least 30 seconds) to get a fresh address pool.
I assume networking worked before, since you were able to download Ubuntu, Tails, and Windows templates (they’re not included by default). So if not dhcp then networking broke at some point while using Tails/Windows in standalone VMs, and as a troubleshooting step you switched from Fedora to Debian templates.
Firing from the hip suggestions:
Increase sys-net memory from 400 MB to at least 450 MB.
Check the sys-net logs for Failed to map TX DMA.
If you use a disposable sys-net, did you also
switch its disposable template to the Debian one?
You might also want to try to
From dom0, run: qvm-prefs sys-firewall netvm sys-net
(Replace names if yours are different, e.g., sys-firewall-debian12 or sys-net-debian.)
If that doesn’t help, force the Debian sys-net to start at boot:
Open Qubes VM Manager
New Debian-based sys-net → Settings → Advanced → check “Start VM at system boot”
Old Fedora-based sys-net → uncheck “Start VM at system boot”
Reboot the machine
(Repeat for sys-firewall if needed.)
Silent network failures when switching templates, OSes, or PCI devices are a poor user experience. The system should show clear errors in the GUI or logs.
Have you checked the sys-net VM logs yet?
If everything above fails and it still breaks silently, your best option might be to file an issue:
