Just wanted to leave a comment to say thank you for sharing your findings and taking the time to write your post here. I am sure you spent a lot of time and effort researching all of this. These kinds of posts are why I love Lemmy and its communities.
Not currently in need of a new VPN, pretty happy with Proton and my plan is active for another 1.5 years. But I still wanted to say I appreciate your post.



That’s where
UserNS=keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000comes into play. It “maps” the containers’ user to your local user on the host to some extent, there is a deeper explanation of what exactly it does in this GitHub issue: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/24934Well the pod only links the container together, it’s not one systemd file. Every container has its own file, so does the pod and the network (separated by ‘—’ in my code block above). You still can start and stop each container as a service separately or just the whole pod with all containers linked to it. Pods have the advantage that the containers in them can talk to each other more easily.
The network I just created to separate my services from each other. Thinking of it, this was the old setup, as I started using gluetun and run it as a privileged container, it’s using the host network anyway. I edited my post above and removed the network unit file.