Last week (commencing July 1st) I tried installing ‘qubes-core-agent-networking’ in debian-12-minimal template and received errors appearing to relate to a ‘temporary’ failure resolving ‘deb.debian.org’ – see attached ‘screen shot’.
I checked source lists and these appeared okay. I suspect I’m overlooking something simple.
Please is anyone able to advise on a resolution to the issue I am experiencing?
Updating debian-12-minimal-test
Is debian-12-minimal-test a clone of debian-12-minimal template or an app/standalone qube based on debian-12-minimal template?
Thank you and apologies for omitting further details. debian-12-minimal-test is a standalone, cloned from ‘standard’ debian-12-minimal template.
Just to make sure you’ve created standalone qube debian-12-minimal-test based on debian-12-minimal template?
If you’ve cloned debian-12-minimal template to debian-12-minimal-test then you’d get debian-12-minimal-test template qube, not standalone.
What’s the debian-12-minimal-test qube net qube?
What’s the output of this command in debian-12-minimal-test qube?
dpkg -l | grep qubes-core-agent-networking
My bad: where I wrote ‘cloned’, I actually created a new standalone qube
based on the debian-12-minimal template.
With regards networking, the standalone ‘points’ at ‘sys-firewall’,
which in turn points at ‘sys-net’. The sys-firewall and sys-net qubes
are ‘standard’ in so far as I have made no changes to them. All other
qubes appear to display no issues with connectivity / connecting to
repos/updating.
From issuing ‘dpkg -l | with grep qubes-core-agent-networking’, nothing
is returned, and from issuing 'dpkg ‘l’ without pipe/grep, it appears
qubes-core-agent-networking is not installed.
As the docs make clear you need to have that package installed to be
able to access networking.
Either clone the template, install that package (and any others you may
need), and then create the standalone, or copy the packages in to the
standalone and manually install them - you will need some dependencies too.
I never presume to speak for the Qubes team.
When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.
Thank you unman; much appreciated. I suspected I was missing something simple.
I guess its mentioned in the docs outside those on minimal templates specifically, and if I had previously read about , clearly forgot: I overlooked that standalones don’t use RPC/qrexec for installation of packages from repos.
I see on the doc on minimal templates the direction on cloning and template customisation and understand (now) how adding qubes-core-agent-networking to a cloned template is necessary to provide a standalone based on this cloned template network access.
On previous reading of the wording around cloning and customisation on this page, the way the wording reads in referring to an original template (implying as downloaded/standard vs cloned/customised), I had understood it was necessary to add ‘customisations’ to a cloned template if only because its useful to have a copy of the original ‘unadulterated’ template to use for alternative customisations/use cases down the line. I understand the matter of standalones having network access is a separate amd particular issue (assuming they can’t rely on RPC/qrexec as can templates); it might be useful to call out in the doc on minimal templates, perhaps by linking to where mentioned elsewhere in the docs, that cloning/customisation is necessary not only to keep versions of templates used for different use cases separate/retain a ‘clean’ original, but also prior to generating a standalone to ensure the generated standalone can connect to a network.