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My setup of Qubes
this document will describe my Qubes Setup and what I did to improve the Qubes experience
About Me
I am working for a Berlin based IT Solution Provider. Working with Linux and even more with Qubes adds some complexity, as several internal workflows but also customer projects are mainly relying on windows software and operating systems. Using Qubes has been a decision as I want to prove that another world is possible and because I want to keep my data as much secure as possible. Additionally I Qubes offers protection when working with one device in several customer environments.
My Hardware
I am using three devices, depending on what I need to do. My main device which I use ~80% of time is the X230 Core i7 which has a 2nd Slice battery, giving me more than 8h of battery runtime.
The favorite device -> Lenovo X230
I think this is the best laptop which has ever been build and it my daily driver. It is also the last X-series laptop which supports CoreBoot and therefore I will likely keep it for a few years.
- 12 inch Laptop
- Intel Core Intel Core i7-3520M @ 2.90 GHz
- 16 GB RAM
- 500 GB Intel SSD
- 1366x768 IPS-Display
- WWAN-Card for LTE connectivity
- 44++ battery
- additional Slice-Battery 19++
- Coreboot with SeaBIOS
- Qubes 4.1
- Windows 10 Enteprise (DualBoot)
The work horse -> Lenovo W540
currently not in use, as the X230 is so versatile and the W540 doesn't run with Coreboot and has a much shorter battery runtime.
My Setup
I have to run a dual boot system as I need to run Windows for specific tasks. But as we are able to se virtual desktops, mostly I am connecting to a remote desktop from within my qubes environment.
My Templates
In order to understand how Qubes OS is working and to have a minimal setup I have choosen to use custom build templates, which are all based on fedora-28-minimal templates. This makes sure that I have only those packages installed, which I need. Additionally the setup of templates is mainly done by scripts which I can run from dom0. Therefore it is very easy to rebuild the whole system from scratch - something which I think is important in case that you have the feeling something might be not running correctly.
I have the following two baseline-templates:
- debian-9
- fedora-28-minimal "baseline" means that those templates are never updated or changed as they are used as seed for my other templates. I qvm-clone those templates and then work on the copy. This allows me to always jump back to cleanest template and rebuild from scratch.
I developed a naming scheme as I have several AppVMs and TemplateVMs:
- all custom build TemplateVMs start with t-DISTRIBUTION-VERSION-NAME (for example t-fedora-28-apps is a template, whoch is based on fedora 28 minimal and has additional packages for my default (fat) Apps-VMs
- all system VMs, start with sys- like sys-net, sys-firewall, sys-usb, sys-vpn
- all other AppVMs, start with my-NAME, for example my-multimedia
Custom build templates:
t-debian-9-multimedia
Template for a Multimedia AppVM, see my Multimedia Howto
- Chrome
- VLC
- Spotify
t-fedora-28-apps
this is my default fat AppVM template, installed packages:
- firefox
- libreoffice
- firefox
- ...
t-fedora-28-mail
this is my template for email tasks, it has installed:
- Thunderbird
- Neomutt
- Davmail (to connect to my corporate microsoft exchange server)
- Offlineimap
- ... I am separating email in two AppVMs for private use and corporate use. attachments from those VMs will be opened in disposable AppVMs.
t-fedora-28-storage
a special template which can be used to store data into one AppVM and share it securly with others via special scripts (which I am proud of :-).
- sshfs for sharing data betwenn VMs
- CryFS for data encryption
- EncFS for data encryption
- onedrived to be able to sync (only encrypted data) to the cloud The whole setup includes 3 AppVMs:
- Storage AppVM - stores the data and encrypts it using EncFS or CryFS
- Access AppVM - can access the Storage AppVM and is able to decrypt
- Sync AppVM - which can sync encrypted data to onedrive (only used for getting data out of onedrive, but could be used in two directions) management of those setup is done via one (!) script which can also build the templates and AppVM.
t-fedora-28-sys
template for my sys-vms
- sys-usb
- sys-firewall
- sys-net
t-fedora-28-vpn
a ProxyVM which can be used to run all traffic through ExpressVPN. This adds a great layer of privacy to qubes as my ISP can't analyse my traffic.
I have written a howto How to use ExpressVPN as ProxyVM with Qubes 4
t-fedora-28-work
My work tenmplate which has Vmware Horizon View, Cisco AnyConnect, Firefox and LibreOffice installed.
other templates
the Whonix templates which come preinstalled with Qubes 4
List of my AppVMs
to be done