Good news, with fedora-38 the network manager supports Wireguard out of the box! The only thing required are extra firewall rules in the VPN qube, as explained in the community documentation about VPN.
This guide assumes you are using a VPN service that has wireguard support. For example, ProtonVPN and Mullvad VPN do support it. But you can also follow this guide to add any other (even your own).
> ℹ️ Make sure fedora-38 template is installed (instructions)
Menu » Qubes Tools » Create Qubes VM:
- name: sys-vpn (you pick yours)
- template: fedora-38
- type: app qube (or AppVM)
- networking: sys-firewall (⚠️ make sure it is NOT “(default) sys-firewall” but instead “sys-firewall)
- ☑️ Launch settings after creation
- advanced (tab) » Provides network access to other qubes
And then OK. Then the qube settings window should show up (proceed to the next step).
In the settings windown that popped up, go to the Services, select network-manager from the drop-down list and click ➕ add. Then save the settings by clicking OK.
Go your VPN provider and either get a download a configuration file for wireguard (e.g.: vpn.conf)
On your VPN provider download the wireguard configuration for the server you want to connect to.
Here are the download pages for some popular VPN services: Mullvad, ProtonVPN
> ℹ️ This is essentially a killswitch. It is a fail-safe that ensures that if your VPN connection fails, it does let anything through.
Open the configuration file in a text editor and take note of the IP address in right next to Endpoint. If the line looks like the following, then you take note of the IP address as 1.2.3.4.
> > Endpoint = 1.2.3.4:5555
>
Open the qube settings for sys-vpn and navigate to the Firewall rules tab and set 🔘 Limit outgoing connections to.
Then click on ➕ to add a new firewall and add your saved IP address(es)
Hit OK to apply and click OK again to apply the settings
On the qube on which you downloaded your wireguard configuration (e.g.: vpn.conf), open the file explorer where the file was saved. Then right-click a file and Copy to another AppVM and choose to sys-vpn as the target.
Open your file manager in sys-vpn and find the <NAME>.conf file you just copied. It should in the directory QubesIncoming. Move it to your home directory.
Open the Terminal application on your sys-vpn qube and run the following command (replacing <NAME>.conf with the correct name of the file):
nmcli connection import type wireguard file vpn.conf
If successful, you should see a notification about successful connection. If that doesn't happen, something may be wrong with your config file:
> ℹ️ You should also see an icon with a padlock in the top-right corner of your screen (system tray). This indicates that your VPN connection is active. Without a padlock, means that it failed to connect.
Now that the VPN is configured, for each qube that you want to connect to the VPN, open its settings and set networking to sys-vpn. If you want this to be the default net qube, then you can set it in the Qubes Global Settings.
After that you're done :partying_face:
This is certainly related to an MTU issue (the packet payload size), I got this issue only with www.duckduckgo.com for instance, so it could be very specific.
A solution is to force the qubes using the VPN provider qube to use a lower MTU, this can be easily achieved using a firewall rule. Add this to /rw/config/qubes-firewall-user-script:
nft add rule ip qubes custom-forward tcp flags syn / syn,rst tcp option maxseg size set rt mtu
> ℹ️ You may want to force all qubes traffic to go through the VPN and block non-VPN traffic.
Add the rules below in /rw/config/qubes-firewall-user-script in sys-vpn:
# Prevent the qube to forward traffic outside of the VPN
nft add rule qubes custom-forward oifname eth0 counter drop
nft add rule ip6 qubes custom-forward oifname eth0 counter drop
> ℹ️ You may also want to force using a defined DNS server (9.9.9.9 in the current example) and blocking all other DNS servers (this avoids dns leaks)
# Redirect all the DNS traffic to the preferred DNS server
DNS=9.9.9.9
nft add chain qubes nat { type nat hook prerouting priority dstnat\; }
nft add rule qubes nat iifname == "vif*" tcp dport 53 dnat "$DNS"
nft add rule qubes nat iifname == "vif*" udp dport 53 dnat "$DNS"