On Friday, 21 August 2020 at 16:58:48 UTC+8 54th Parallel wrote:

> I'm having the same issue with disposable firewalls built on 
> debian-10-minimal, with the minimum amount of packages, on 
> brand-spanking-new installations (plural) being unreliable firewalls. They 
> sometimes function but not all the time--and this is what's scary, because 
> there's no way of knowing without manually checking all the time. The 
> warning prompts when editing firewall rules aren't useful indicators since 
> they always appear regardless of whether filtering is happening.
>
> I ran systemctl in both and found that qubes-firewall.service is not 
> running in either, despite having manually activated them. I'm not a 
> technical person, but this seems like a pretty critical issue to me 
> (unreliable firewall with no indicator)--a warning about using minimal 
> debian as templates for firewalls should be put up somewhere highly visible.
>
> This unreliability has been bugging me for a while and I've been testing 
> and testing (to the best of my abilities) before realizing that this is 
> almost certainly not a user issue, so Sven, the OP,  probably either ran 
> into the issue again, didn't know about his deactivated firewalls, or 
> didn't report the issue. 
>

After some more probing around, I think I've found the issue, and that what 
I wrote earlier contains inaccuracies. The unreliable firewall might not be 
a debian-10-minimal issue, though the warning prompt that appears whenever 
editing firewall rules in a connected VM is. 

My setup has two firewalls--one behind sys-net and another behind a VPN VM. 
Though the two firewalls are clones of one another, the sys-net firewall 
works (responds to rules set in appVMs) and the proxyVM firewall doesn't. 
This is what caused me to think that deb-10-min firewalls in general are 
unreliable--some things are connected to the net-firewall (sometimes) and 
most are connected to the VPN-firewall. This makes it look like the 
firewalls work sometimes. 

I have two laptops running Qubes with the same setup. Of the four 
firewalls, all with qubes-firewall explicitly enabled, only one actually 
has the qubes-firewall.service show up after typing 'systemctl | grep 
firewall'. Each of these firewalls were created in fresh but updated 
installations of 4.0.3 with the absolute minimum amount of packages 
(qubes-core-agent-passwordless-root (so I can configure sudo prompt), 
qubes-core-agent-networking, apparmor*) and the typical settings, along 
with qubes-vm-hardening (vm-boot-protect enabled).

Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated since this is a massive 
headache for me.

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