qubes-doc/privacy/whonix-reinstall.md

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Reinstall Whonix in Qubes

If you suspect your Whonix templates are broken, misconfigured, or compromised, or if you wish to do a clean reinstall in order to upgrade to a new version, you can reinstall the Whonix templates from the Qubes repository. This procedure involves uninstalling your Whonix templates, then installing them again.

1. (Optional) Clone your existing whonix-gw and whonix-ws templates.

   This can be a good idea if you've customized the existing templates and want to keep them. On the other hand, if you suspect that these templates are broken, misconfigured, or compromised, you may want to remove them without cloning them.

2. (Optional) Temporarily change all VMs based on whonix-gw and whonix-ws to another template (e.g., the ones created in the previous step).

   This can be a good idea if you have user data in these VMs that you want to keep. On the other hand, if you suspect that these VMs (or the templates on which they are based) are broken, misconfigured, or compromised, you may want to remove them instead. You can do this in Qubes Manager by right-clicking on the VM and clicking Remove VM, or you can use the command qvm-remove <vm-name> in dom0.

3. Uninstall the Whonix templates from dom0:

    $ sudo yum remove qubes-template-whonix-gw
    $ sudo yum remove qubes-template-whonix-ws
   

4. Reinstall the Whonix templates in dom0:

    $ sudo qubes-dom0-update --enablerepo=qubes-templates-community \
      qubes-template-whonix-gw qubes-template-whonix-ws
   

5. If you followed step 2, change the VMs from step 2 back to the new whonix-gw and whonix-ws. If you instead removed all VMs based on the old whonix-gw and whonix-ws, simply create your desired VMs from the new templates.

   At a minimum, you'll want a ProxyVM (conventionally called sys-whonix) based on whonix-gw and an AppVM based on whonix-ws that uses sys-whonix as its NetVM.