my dorm requires me to set up ethernet connections manually. since they are not persistent by default, this is a hassle every time i reboot. i want to know if there is a secure way to make a certain profile persistent or if i should just accept it for the security.
First check if your MAC randomization is on, and if so, it’s the school DHCP/DNS server that is assigning the random address. If you know what address it is supposed to be, then click on the network applet in the upper right and enter that IP address manually.
I guess he can already handle that but is failing on keeping it persistent.
Per default you would be using network manager - I think the arch wiki is quite good on showing of file based configs.
Regarding the persistence of such configs it depends on your setup. If your sys-net is based upon a simple template and is not disposable, you could simply create your config in the template. After shutting down the template and rebooting sys-net the config will be there.
If your sys-net is a disposable vm you would make these changes in the disposable-template.
But, you would first need to persist the NM dir inside the disp-tpl itself.
For that, create a something.conf file on /rw/config/qubes-bind-dirs.d/ with content binds+=( '/etc/NetworkManager' )
After you restart that disp-tpl, you can keep persisted NM configs for sys-net.