[solved] OpenURL not allowed in same qube

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1

Hi guys,

I am using qubes since 6 months now and am quite happy with it. But today something happened that I cannot explain and researching the issue also did not result in anything useful.

I have multiple qubes running. Some are opening URLs in the same qube, others are configured to ask to which qube to forward the link. All fine. But suddenly one of the qubes (my “work” qube) shows a behavior that I have not configured and cannot explain. When clicking on a link inside an application the “Execute operation” dialog pops up. This is weird in 2 ways:

  1. I never configured the qube to do so and before my leave (I was on leave for 1 week) clicking on an http link resulted in the work browser to open it.
  2. the “work” qube is not listed in the qubes list, all others are.

I tried a few things:

  • xdg-open https://www.google.com inside “work” qube, resulting in the Operation execution dialog where “work” qube is missing
  • same as above from a qube that is instructed to open links in another qube. Here I can select the “work” qube, but upon clicking “ok” the dialog reappears, this time “work” qube is not there any more
  • checking via journalctl there is no error listed
  • checked policy files in dom0 to assure there is no special handling for “OpenURL”.

So it seems to be related to the “work” qube itself, but I have not changed any policies or similar which could explain that issue. I restarted the qube already and even the laptop, no change, still the same.

To be clear: other qubes are working fine, it is only this particular qube which fails.

Thanks for help!

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2

What I just realized is that if the Operation execution dialog is opened from a particular qube then this qube is never included in the list. But the problem described with the dialog itself (which should not appear) and the test case with xdg-open shows, that something with the work qube is wrong.

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3

Ok guys, forget it. It seems to be an issue with the default browser application. By changing this setting I was able to adjust the behavior and get rid of the dialog. Not sure how exactly this happened, I am now able to get further down the road.

Thanks for everybody who invested time so far!

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