I got a new ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop for work. Of course I immediately installed Fedora 28 on it. Everything seemed to work just fine. But the laptop came with a ThinkPad Thunderbolt dock and when I went to go use it, I noticed the Ethernet port didn’t work. Then I noticed the USB ports didn’t work. But at least the HDMI port worked? (Full disclosure: I didn’t try the VGA port).

It turns out the solution was really simple, but I didn’t find a simple explanation so I’m putting one here. (Comment #17 of Red Hat Buzilla #1367508 had the basic solution. I hope this post becomes a little easier to find.)

The dock uses Thunderbolt which includes some security features. A package called bolt provides a management tool for this. Happily, it’s already in the Fedora 28 repo.

First, I installed it

# dnf install bolt

Then I examined the connected device


# boltctl list
● Lenovo ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock
├─ type: peripheral
├─ name: ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock
├─ vendor: Lenovo
├─ uuid: 00cd2054-ef95-0801-ffff-ffffffffffff
├─ status: connected
│ ├─ authflags: none
│ └─ connected: Fri 29 Jun 2018 03:13:10 PM UTC
└─ stored: no


Finally, I enrolled the device

# boltctl enroll 00cd2054-ef95-0801-ffff-ffffffffffff
● Lenovo ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock
├─ type: peripheral
├─ name: ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock
├─ vendor: Lenovo
├─ uuid: 00cd2054-ef95-0801-ffff-ffffffffffff
├─ dbus path: /org/freedesktop/bolt/devices/00cd2054_ef95_0801_ffff_ffffffffffff
├─ status: authorized
│ ├─ authflags: none
│ ├─ parent: cf030000-0080-7f18-23d0-7d0ba8c14120
│ ├─ syspath: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/0000:05:00.0/0000:06:00.0/0000:07:00.0/domain0/0-0/0-1
│ ├─ authorized: Fri 29 Jun 2018 03:19:39 PM UTC
│ └─ connected: Fri 29 Jun 2018 03:13:10 PM UTC
└─ stored: yes
├─ when: Fri 29 Jun 2018 03:19:39 PM UTC
├─ policy: auto
└─ key: no


After that, everything worked as expected. I’d like to thank the people who did the work to discover and implement the fix. I hope this post means a little less Googling for the next person.