Thank you so much for reading my post.
I am rather at my wit’s end with this issue, which totally cripples using Qubes. It must be the result of a critical bug.
Here’s my story:
- I bought a 2013 Dell laptop (not on HCL) a year ago and installed Qubes. After replacing the network card, I was able to get online with
sys-net
, but no other VMs had any connectivity. I did a lot of searches but never found an answer on how to fix this issue – until one day it magically went away and I was able to set up my Qubes system, which went swimmingly. Great OS! (or so I thought…) - Fast forward to a few weeks ago. While I was away from the computer at a random point in time, my online processes in VMs simply stopped being able to get online. The bug had returned! I spent many hours researching, but my networking knowledge is very limited so I wasn’t able to get very far. I hadn’t changed any settings, although I had been keeping up with Qubes updates.
- I tried numerous things to solve the issue: changing templates of
sys-net
,sys-firewall
etc. to Fedora 29,30,31,32… making a newsys-net
from scratch, restoring a backup from when it still worked, installing 4.0.3 and 4.0.4rc from scratch and more, all to no avail.sys-net
happily connected to wifi, but no other qubes could get any connectivity from it. - I found some posts online that suggested the problem may be a race condition due to slow hardware, so I bought a new computer that IS on the HCL and installed 4.0.3 fresh on it. SAME ISSUE AGAIN.
- I just tried installing 4.0.1 fresh on this new computer and still have ZERO CONNECTIVITY IN VMs outside of
sys-net
. I can’t do updates or anything.
I am all out of ideas now, having dropped a lot of money on a new computer I didn’t need and now seeing that all my fresh installs of Qubes are totally broken. Are others having this same issue? If so, that will certainly kill usage of this OS. It seems like an absolutely crippling critical bug to leave open.
I have found a number of very similar issues to mine on Github, one of which was actually closed (5570):
/5576
/5570
/5291
/5269
Of course I have tried all the straightforward fixes provided in those issue discussions, but nothing solved the issue. It would make sense that my issue is a race condition, considering how it both disappeared and reappeared out of nowhere. To be clear, I don’t actually know for sure if any of those issues is the same as mine.
To reiterate, sys-net
connects to WiFi perfectly, but no other qubes are online. I try running Firefox and/or pinging 8.8.8.8
in sys-firewall
for example, and get no response.
Running sudo iptables -t nat -L
in sys-net
gives me for the Chain PR-QBS
4 DNAT
entries, 1 UDP and 1 TCP for each 10.139.1.1
& 10.139.1.2
. I found that command on one of the issues above; my knowledge of networking is very basic so I’m not really sure what I’m looking at.
I tried running all the suggestions in 5648 above – no change.
Questions
- Can you recommend a fix for my issue?
- If you think Issue 5570 is the same as mine, I’d like to try to download the fix, but of course all my VMs are offline but
sys-net
. Can you recommend a workaround so my VMs can get online for an update, somehow? (I tried adding networking features to my default Fedora 29 template but couldn’t figure out how to get online as no connection could be added via the GUI).
Be easy on me, please. I have rudimentary command line abilities and only basic networking knowledge.
Thank you very kindly
—A frustrated Qubes user