I connected to a network yesterday and checked my sys-net to see if it was randomizing. It now says user@sys-net. Has anyone encountered this issue or know what caused it/how to fix it? It was working fine on the last connection I made. Thanks! Running 4.2.3.
Are you connecting with WiFi or Ethernet?
Give more details about where do you see it and what else did you expect to see.
I was connecting to public WiFi as usual. I looked in my sys-net xfce terminal where the randomized hostname is usually there; āsyn.2600.XXXX etcā¦ā. and it just said āuser@sys-netā.
I went checked /etc/dhcp/dhclient on sys-net as advised on the forums and uncommented āshow hostnameā, which showed me the usual randomized hostname, but didnāt change it, and for some reason even though my sys-net is not disposable, the changes I make to the file arenāt persistent. This is very odd and somewhat concerning. Iād really hate to have to reinstall again for such a thing.
Use bind-dirs to edit files outside of /home/user and /usr/local directories in app qubes:
How to make any file persistent (bind-dirs) | Qubes OS
Templates | Qubes OS
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Perhaps Iām doing something wrong but nothing on that page worked. I tried in the template itās based on but still no persistence, is there something special about the sys-net qube/template? I never mess with the sys-net qube, it just stopped randomizing. Iām considering reinstalling at this point because itās been 3 hours and iām frustrated. But I really want to know what caused it. Thanks for your help!
Post the instructions to enable the hostname randomizing that you used.
first i tried your suggestion and then I tried this, thereās a section on hostname:
This:
Wonāt change the hostname, itād just stop DHCP client from sending your hostname.
I reinstalled it and it still says user@sys-net, so it must be some update that caused it. Seems counter productive. Is there anyone who knows how to fix this? Also, another thing Iām going to make a post about is why āqvm-copy-to-vmā no longer works with appVMs and how I should use āqvm-copyā to transfer between whonix workstation and whonix gateway.(I wrote a guide on how to use snowflake in Qubes/whonix and now i need to learn how to implement my Snowlake guide with these new qvm-copy commands)
Which guide did you use to randomize the hostname?
none of them did, the one you posted with the dhcp stuff let me see the randomized hostname in the terminal as grey text along some other connections or something, and localhost or something, Iām having trouble finding it, but it didnāt change the host name, iām trying to learn this new qvm-copy command so i can copy the snowflake client from whonix workstation template to whonix gateway template as per my guide to fix snowflake. iām editing that right now. I donāt know what to do about this hostname thing. Maybe devs will have an answer, it is making me want to roll back to the last update. or even go back to kvm whonix on debian which was annoying to build. Iām not trying to blast that Iām using qubes everywhere I go. Sorry if my response is erratic, i need to have a molar removed from my mouth and itās incredibly painful.
Setting dhcp-send-hostname=false in the NetworkManager config wouldnāt change your hostname so you did something else to randomize the hostname.
no it used to just come that way opening sys-net xfce terminal, i even reinstalled the whole system just now to check if it was that. itās not. today was the first day i realized the hostname wasnāt randomized by default, and it was after updates.
The hostname in sys-net never was randomized by default, it was your custom change in some config file. I guess youāve changed come config in the template of sys-net qube and this config was overwritten with default config when some package updated.
but i never mess with sys-net, never have. I wouldnāt even know what to put in the config to randomize it or where that even goes.
You did change it here:
Try to make this change in the template of sys-net if the bind-dirs are not working. Maybe the bind-dirs are mounted after this config file is read and old config is used by the system.
If you want to avoid leaking your hostname (e.g. āsys-netā in a Qubes OS context) to the DHCP server, the solution does not involve randomizing the hostname! Instead, tell the DHCP client to not send any hostname at all. Luckily, not sending any hostname is already the default behavior for the default DHCP client used by NetworkManager (which isnāt dhclient, but a built-in internal implementation) - as long as the file /etc/hostname doesnāt exist in sys-net.
Thank you for clearing that up. But do you remember the randomized sys-net hostnames that changed on every connection by default before? This coincides with the qvm-copy-to-vm depreciation to āqvm-copyā etc, i just had to rewrite my qubes-whonix snowflake guide because of it and that was in september that I wrote it and it used 'qvm-copy-to-vm".
As far as i have always known, if ever opened up sys-net terminal it always had this randomized host name that would sometimes include name of the ISP. I did not make it do that(to my knowledge). Sorry if I caused any confusion and Iāll delete this thread if it is completely pointless(i donāt think it is though.) Iām sorry if this was a pointless thread. Thank you guys for your help! I think I finished rewriting my Qubes-Whonix snowflake guide for āqvm-copyā
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Hmm, Iāve never seen that with my Fedora-based sys-net.
Yes, it was a custom script which was propagated via qubes-community doc when it was still a git repo (and probably written by me). It was never upstreamed to Qubes OS. IIRC I removed it ~2 years back and replaced it with the current recommendations as I believe them to be more reasonable (random hostname is relatively obvious, too, imho; and if not sending a hostname becomes standard, itās the most anonymous solution). Btw I even remember some lengthy discussion [1] about my decisionā¦ Anyway Qubes OS upstreamed many settings for Wifi as Marek had apparently read the guideā¦ 
I havenāt touched anything since.
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