I think I found a moderately serious bug. And I could use some help with recovery. (kali/HVM/rootfs)

[sevas]

I tried to install kali again. Last time I couldnt get it to run, but with your
help, I correctly created an HVM. Now I did something stupid.

When partitioning, you will be shown 3 virtual drives. If you type 'pvs' (or is it
'lvs'?) into the dom0 terminal, you will see 3 virtual partitions: kali, kali-private and kali-root. Or something of the like.

I assume that is the 3 that you see in the kali-vm in qubes-manager.

Well, one is obviously my rootfs and one is my homedir. The third has a direct
correlation with the homedir. So when you change the size of the homedir, so
changes the other one.

The bug I think I have found is that when this third partition vm, if overwritten,
overwrites dom0 from a virtual domain.

I tried to install kali on this third vm and the next time I booted Qubes,
errors were given that qubes-manager did not exist. I still could boot, but
no VMs could start.

Its possible that this could have something to do with loop devices and having
too many of them, maybe a buffer overflow? But I doubt it. After starting kali
repeatedly, loop devices were made again and again eventually denying me any RAM
space to do anything including saving a text doc.

Now, I really dont want to reinstall everything but sometimes this is much faster
than troubleshooting the issue. But does anyone have any good ideas?

Ive downloaded the source code for qubes-manager and Im going to try tomorrow to compile it. But Ive never done this before, I dont know what all I have to do.

$ sudo make rpms , right? Then what? Im going to have to boot into recovery mode just to get the qubes-manager onto the machine.

Can I do
$ sudo dnf reinstall qubes-manager? or $ qubes-dom0-update --reinstall qubes-manager?

What if I cant get internet access? Is the rpm still on my machine?

Thanks many!!

[awokd]

On Sun, April 8, 2018 1:53 am, sevas wrote:

> The bug I think I have found is that when this third partition vm, if
> overwritten, overwrites dom0 from a virtual domain.
>
> I tried to install kali on this third vm and the next time I booted
> Qubes,
> errors were given that qubes-manager did not exist. I still could boot,
> but no VMs could start.

I couldn't recreate this. I installed Kali light to /dev/xvdc (which is
"-volatile" according to lvs), rebooted, and everything seems fine. Did
you install an update lately? Check /var/log/dnf.log*.

> Its possible that this could have something to do with loop devices and
> having too many of them, maybe a buffer overflow? But I doubt it. After
> starting kali repeatedly, loop devices were made again and again
> eventually denying me any RAM space to do anything including saving a text
> doc.

Maybe this broke it somehow.

> Now, I really dont want to reinstall everything but sometimes this is
> much faster than troubleshooting the issue. But does anyone have any good
> ideas?

Not exactly sure on how to fix it or what else might be broken, so a
reinstall is probably safest right now.

[sevas]

ok thanks for your input. Ill just reinstall, I suppose. I do have backups!! Cant
get them unless I boot into rescue because the usb no longer works without my
sys-usb being able to start. I will try to recreate this and see on my second HDD.

Ill check the dnf log too.