qubes r3.2 bricked

[Bernhard]

Hello, I bricked my system a bit. Yesterady I decided to follow the
.onion update procedure. For dom0 all went well (after reading that I
must change to whonix-net),but I had to modify the debian-8 and
fedora-24 repo-files "by hand". No big deal. I could update f24 (this
morning), but debian bugged a bit. Suddenly I thought that maybe I had
to put netVM to whonix for the templateVM's as well. With a doubt on it
I looked up what I did with f24 .. and there, by accident I let the
dropdown box on "sys-net" instead on sys-firewall (or whonix-net).
Immediately sys-net derailed and lost network. When I tried to switch
the templateVM setting back to sys-firewall, I just got a error box
saying "16". I decided to solve this with a clean reboot. This allowed
to switch back the templateVM's back to net-firewall for both, debian
and f24. But net-usb, net-sys and net-firewall (they all depend on f24)
did not come up again. I thought that this will resolve with a second
clean reboot. But nope. So, the state is that I cannot start any appVM
(they close immediately), and I have no network. Worse: I have no idea
how to fix it, so I ask you for help.

Bernhard

[Ángel]

Bernhard wrote:
> Hello, I bricked my system a bit. Yesterady I decided to follow the

> ..onion update procedure. For dom0 all went well (after reading that I

> must change to whonix-net),but I had to modify the debian-8 and
> fedora-24 repo-files "by hand". No big deal. I could update f24 (this
> morning), but debian bugged a bit. Suddenly I thought that maybe I had
> to put netVM to whonix for the templateVM's as well. With a doubt on it
> I looked up what I did with f24 .. and there, by accident I let the
> dropdown box on "sys-net" instead on sys-firewall (or whonix-net).

I would expect that this would make you lose the firewall protection...

> Immediately sys-net derailed and lost network.

...not sys-net to die.


Is any of your /var/lib/qubes/*/*/firewall.xml files 0-bytes?
(if so, delete it -so it gets replaced with default settings- and
restart)

[Bernhard]

Thank you Angel, for helping me.

me@dom0 qubes]$ find /var/lib/qubes -iname *.xml

finds only some files qubes-*somedate* in backup two xml fies in updates
and qubes.xml itself. When I run in

me@dom0 qubes]$ dom0 qvm-start [some appvm] I get some lines like


File "/usr/bin/qvm-start, line 136 then 120

File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/../000QubesVM.py

File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/../006QubesProxyVM.py

qubes.qdb.Error: (2, 'No such file or directory')


and, as I said, nothing starts. I start thinking of a disaster-mode data
recovery since I do not know how I could possibly unbrick a system that
has no network anymore?! I add some history: after having changed to the
.onion repo's, the fedora24 system suggested 123(!) package updates (I
agreed). That seemed a lot to me, since I check for updates every day.
If I have to guess, it is there that it became a brick. Is it sure that
the f24 on qubes-os.org and the onion repo are the same? Can I unroll
the last update?

Thank you for any hint or help Bernhard

[Ángel]

Bernhard wrote:
> Thank you Angel, for helping me.
>

You're welcome, Bernhard.

> and, as I said, nothing starts. I start thinking of a disaster-mode data
> recovery since I do not know how I could possibly unbrick a system that
> has no network anymore?!

That's just because most VMs depends on sys-net, and sys-net is not
available. Can you still edit them with Qubes VM Manager? The VMs should
at least start if you set their NetVM to none. Then you could create a
new sys-vm if it still doesn't get fixed.

Best

[Bernhard]

Hello Angel, that worked. With "no net" I can start the VM's.

That solves a big pb, I can now backup data :) Before this trick, only
with dom0 I would not have been able to attach the usb anywhere :))

1) So, may I ask you some hint how to generate a new sys-net, please?

2) Another approach is this one: I looked at the guest-sys-net.log I
cannot retype everything, so I give some extracts. The F24 part starts
with fsck (?!) .. and after some time FAILED to start File System Check
on Root Device. At this point one service after the next is Stopped, the
log ends with : "Welcome to emergency mode"

So, maybe I can first fsck the stopped sys-net fs from within dom0 by
hand? How could I do that? I guess I loop /var/lib/qubes/(??) and then
fsck it?

Thank you, Bernhard