Sovereignty: A VPN Outside the Blast Radius

While running outdoor, my mind has all the time of the world to reflect. During one of my recent runs, I was thinking of my sovereignty journey that progressed nicely. In the previous months I tackled a lot of hurdles such as power failure resiliency, robust storage, remote backup, minimal overhead, centralized monitoring and alerting, infrastructure as code, private networking, internet connectivity.

Despite of these successes, a little voice kept nagging in my head. What if the container runtime goes down? What if critical services go down? What if mounts become inaccessible or the reverse proxy stops? I tried to counter argue with myself by throwing arguments as “how big is the chance?”, “If I’m behind my laptop I can fix it”. While both arguments are fair, I realized that if there are serious problems, likely the VPN Server container is down as well. I found a major flaw in my setup. I was occupied the rest of the run. I hate to waste a good run… sigh