WangLu's Notes

I recently tried to install Qubes OS alongside an existing Windows installation. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult—way harder than my last attempt—likely due to a combination of my encrypted  /boot  setup and older hardware. Here are some notes from the process. Shrinking an NTFS Volume I needed to free up some space from a Windows NTFS volume. Normally, this just takes a few clicks in Disk Management. This time, however, Windows reported a "shrinkable volume" that was suspiciously small. Following  this answer , I tried the standard fixes: Disabled hibernation ( powercfg /h off ) Disabled the pagefile Disabled system protection This increased the shrinkable volume a bit, but nowhere near the actual free space left on the partition. Digging into the Windows Application logs in Event Viewer, I finally found the culprit:  The last unmovable file appears to be: \$Mft::$DATA . It turns out  $Mft  is a special block in NTFS that cannot be easily moved, ...

I've been running Qubes OS on Machine A alongside Windows for a while. My setup involved storing the unencrypted  /boot  partition and the LUKS header on an external USB drive. Recently, I planned to install Qubes on Machine B, also in a dual-boot configuration. However, the complexity jumped significantly: Machine B has Secure Boot enabled because BitLocker requires it. On previous installs, I grew tired of toggling Secure Boot in the BIOS every time I switched operating systems. I only have one USB drive. Managing separate  /boot  partitions for two different Qubes installations on a single thumb drive is messy. After some experimentation, I found a way to solve both problems. Sharing One USB Drive for Multiple Qubes Installations The solution is elegant: Don't store  /boot  on the USB drive. Instead, move  /boot  to the encrypted internal disk partition. The USB drive's only job is to unlock that partition and hand over control to the system. O...

After writing a Nonogram solver, I decided to tackle a Sudoku solver to practice Rust. My goal wasn't just to support classic Sudoku rules, but also to handle variants like Thermometer, Arrow, and Cage etc. 1. Brute Force It is fairly easy to write a brute force or backtracking algorithm. This approach is sufficient for most classic Sudoku puzzles, but it becomes unbearably slow as soon as variant rules are introduced. I considered this step a warmup—a baseline to improve upon. 2. Constraint Propagation Here, I tried to introduce "logical thinking" to the algorithm. I used  u16  as a bitmask to represent the possible values of a cell. Whenever a cell's state changes (due to guessing, backtracking, or propagation), the algorithm consults all constraints to eliminate impossible candidates. While Nonogram is technically an NP-Complete problem, in practice, my constraint-propagation solver (without guessing) can solve almost all puzzles found online. I’ve only seen one ex...

I've been experimenting with Qubes OS on my new laptop and wanted to share some notes on the experience. Hardware Overall, Qubes OS works quite well on my hardware. Aside from typical issues like deep sleep, speaker performance, and touchpad scroll speed, the experience has been smooth. I particularly like that I can boot directly from a microSD card. This allowed me to move the  /boot  partition to the card while completely disabling USB access in  dom0  for better security. Detached  /boot  and LUKS Header Moving  /boot  and the LUKS header to a microSD card is a fun project, but it has some drawbacks: I have to remember to mount  /boot  before updating  dom0 . The system won't shut down properly if I forget to unmount  /boot . Testing Qubes OS 4.3 rc3 I decided to test the Qubes OS 4.3 rc3 release by performing an in-place upgrade. Unfortunately, the system failed to boot afterward. dracut  Issues After the upgrade, the...

I've been running a few containers for several years. They were all running under rootless Docker with a single user. Initially, I planned to  migrate the containers to VMs , but I couldn't get a stable workflow after about two months of effort. Later,  gVisor caught my attention , and I decided to migrate to Podman with gVisor instead. The new plan is to run each container with  --userns=auto  and use Quadlet for systemd integration. This approach provides better isolation and makes writing firewall rules easier. I'm now close to migrating all my containers. Here are a couple of rough edges I'd like to share. Network Layout I compared  various networking options  and spent a few hours trying the one-interface-per-group approach before giving up. I settled on a single macvlan network and decided to use static IP addresses for my containers. To prevent a randomly assigned IP address from conflicting with a predefined one, I allocated a large IP range for my ...

I want to filter the outgoing network traffic for all of my containers based on a set of rules. For example: Some containers should be blocked from accessing the internet entirely. Some containers should have unrestricted internet access. Some containers should be able to access the internet, but not a specific list of URLs. Some containers should only be allowed to access a specific list of URLs. To manage this, I will define logical policy groups and assign each container to one. As a general rule, only DNS and HTTP/HTTPS traffic will be permitted. Option 1: A Proxy for Each Policy Group Imagine Container A is only allowed to access  www.google.com . Here’s how this approach would work: Create an Nginx (or  socat ) container that listens on port 443 and acts as a reverse proxy for  www.google.com . Place both the Nginx proxy and Container A into an  internal  container network. Within this network, add  www.google.com  as a network alias for the Ngin...