Counter point: I don’t want an untraceable phone used as a detonator. There’s a reason that these things are linked to real-world identities.

It will make no difference to the performance of a VPN; nothing that those nodes are doing is IO bound.

Even if you own your own servers you still need somewhere to host them; ISPs / colocation providers are going to have the same issues with abuse.

PXE is automagic being basically kind of hacky extension to DHCP stuff.

If PXE is enabled the machine will automatically find it via a DHCP relay on the network.

the boot image supplying server being in the same intranet as the rest of the other servers … Since the first mode is probably too unsafe, that leaves us with the second mode.

Why do you think that’s unsafe?

That’s a great question. Mostly it’d be a matter of exporting and then importing / converting the disk image and standing up similar VM “hardware”.

You might still need to reactivate the licence; I’m not sure if the virtual hardware move will trip activation.

Why are you using VirtualBox for this anyway?

KVM/QEMU + Virt-manager all the way.

It was just a few years ago, before everything on the Internet was HTTPS,

It’s been more than a decade since that was the case.

hybrid intel/nvidia that can give you a lot of headaches on Linux

Nah, nowadays we just use PRIME render offload via prime-run and things “just work”.

The whole hybrid Optimus/Bumblebee graphics switcheroo was a terrible idea and I’m glad it died an ignoble death.

The Wikimedia commons is obviously the appropriate place for these screenshots to live.

And OP was talking about not answering ‘google chat’. Calling that SMS is comparing apples to potatoes.

And that’s materially different from having to join Discord/Teams/Facebook because that’s where someone you need to speak with communicates with how?

CloudFlare now puts ‘protection’ on front of a ton of sites via it’s CDN. Last I checked (almost a decade ago now…) That was beginning to impact the ability of Tor users to browse the open web.