Dotfiles and Bittorrent Sync/Spideroak

[Niels Kobschätzki]

Hi,

three questions:

1) How do you handle dotfiles in Qubes? I.e. I want to use my vim-settings across all my VMs and usually not only a dumped down vimrc but also the plugins. The same for my fish-files and maybe some others. In the past I used dotflies in conjunction with stow (https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/). I guess I can forget about that?

2) I use BittorrentSync (btsync) to sync my keepass-files (with some other computers and my phone). I'd like to put my keepass-files into a VM that has only internet-access so far bittorrent sync needs it. What would be the best way to do this?

3) For my personal online-backup I am using SpiderOak. Do I see it correctly, that I have to run several instances of the SpiderOak-client to keep my files backed up? (The same for btsync when I want to sync files from another VM than the one with the keepass-files).

Niels

[Alex]

On 05/26/2016 11:35 PM, Niels Kobschätzki wrote:
> Hi,
Hi!

> three questions:
It appears to me (but I may be wrong) that you are new to Qubes. If you
can, I suggest you take some time with an experimental installation. It
took me nearly one month to wrap my head around the
one-workstation-many-vm concept before being able to successfully move
my main workstation to Qubes.

> 1) How do you handle dotfiles in Qubes? I.e. I want to use my
> vim-settings across all my VMs and usually not only a dumped down vimrc
> but also the plugins. The same for my fish-files and maybe some others.
> In the past I used dotflies in conjunction with stow
> (https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/). I guess I can forget about that?

The filesystem of appVM is based on the filesystem from their template.
On top of that, an overlay filesystem is added, as a separate disk
(usually /dev/xvdb) on /rw. From /rw, a couple directories are reparsed
on /home and /usr/local.

tl;dr: everything in /home and /usr/local is personal to that appVM and
will persist across reboots - the /rw filesystem, coming from /dev/xvdb,
is an actual read-write filesystem. Everything else is "fake-rw", and
will accept any modification but it will not be persisted - it will be
lost across reboots. May be handy for testing installations before
applying them to the template.

So i don't think you will be able to use stow from everywhere in the
system; you may want to keep as much as you can in your home directory,
and maybe stow may help you there.

Do remember that Qubes is a workstation OS, and started as a single-user
workstation OS, so there will not be any other (interactive) users
beyond the one you will be using; thus keeping everything in your home
directory should not be a big problem.

> 3) For my personal online-backup I am using SpiderOak. Do I see it
> correctly, that I have to run several instances of the SpiderOak-client
> to keep my files backed up? (The same for btsync when I want to sync
> files from another VM than the one with the keepass-files).

The best option is to have it set up in every appvm that needs backup,
if you are going to store the copy away from the computer via network.

If your backup are to be stored on a USB disk, you may want to use the
integrated backup from dom0.

--
Alex

[Andrew David Wong]

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On 2016-05-26 14:35, Niels Kobschätzki wrote:
> Hi,
>
> three questions:
>
> 1) How do you handle dotfiles in Qubes? I.e. I want to use my
> vim-settings across all my VMs and usually not only a dumped down
> vimrc but also the plugins. The same for my fish-files and maybe
> some others. In the past I used dotflies in conjunction with stow
> (https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/). I guess I can forget about
> that?
>

There are many ways to approach this. One option is to put your
dotfiles and plugins in the TemplateVM so that they'll automatically
be propagated to any AppVMs created from those TemplateVMs. (Note that
the propagation will not occur after the fact to existing AppVMs.)

> 2) I use BittorrentSync (btsync) to sync my keepass-files (with
> some other computers and my phone). I'd like to put my
> keepass-files into a VM that has only internet-access so far
> bittorrent sync needs it. What would be the best way to do this?
>

I'm not sure if there are specific protocols or IP addresses you can
whitelist for this. But if there are, you can simply create a VM to
hold your KeePass files, then set its firewall rules to allow only the
appropriate protocols and/or IP addresses.

> 3) For my personal online-backup I am using SpiderOak. Do I see it
> correctly, that I have to run several instances of the
> SpiderOak-client to keep my files backed up? (The same for btsync
> when I want to sync files from another VM than the one with the
> keepass-files).

You could do that. Or, you could run it in a single VM, then use
qvm-backup (also available in Qubes Manager) to put your (optionally
encrypted) backup archives there.

- --
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org
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