Thanks apparatus I appreciate your recommendations! I’m on 4.2. I made your changes to no avail, but then the ping issue reminded me that Mullvad’s guide on their website mentioned some commands that needed to be added via dom0 using the qvm-firewall command.
in dom 0, I entered:
qvm-firewall MullvadVPN add --before 0 accept dsthost=192.168.1.0/24
And now it appears to be working: I can ssh to 192.168.1.1, browse webservers and on my local network, and all other traffic goes through the VPN. Thanks for helping me figure this out!
PS. I had tried previously using the QubesManager gui and adding 192.168.0/24 to the list of permitted outbound connects on the firewall tab, but it didn’t work (as explained in the mullvad guide on their website)…I think because adding it here just puts it at the end of the list which puts it after the rule that drops anything left over. Using the command line so I can use ‘–before 0’ was the fix I was missing!