There is no "if I can't..." message. If I block all of the IPs that seem related to you, it decides that none of my interfaces are working, and thus I have no access to the internet.

I'm a bit calmed today after resolving yesterday's failure (another thread), but I'm still flying in opposition of the "cloud" movement, and likely always will.

ClearOS is the only network-related thing I'm running right now that isn't either application-specific hardware, or virtualized. It is the one thing I fear being broken/corrupted by an update. Anything else that gets mangled gets restored from a snapshot and little to nothing is lost. If ClearOS gets mangled, however, *everything* is dead in the water until either I figure it out, somebody posts a solution on here, or I wipe the entire system and start over.

I'm totally okay with a model that says "here's an update, we think it might work, it might break stuff, why don't you find out for us?" as long as I get to choose when to do that and on which systems. I have periods where work is slow and do certainly enjoy tinkering, and I also have sacrificial sandbox systems. If one system goes down on a Friday it's a slight annoyance ("well, there went my weekend"), the disaster is when it's Sunday evening and I'm getting ready for (literally everybody I work for) to open on Monday morning, and every system is fighting with me in some unexpected way. That's when I'm in a panic, that's when things are critical, and, frankly, that's when I'm furious.