I’m reaching here because I don’t know the first thing about Mullvad, but it probably has some script that takes care of it’s own DNS needs. I remember the before times, when you had to write up and down scripts that would update resolve.conf directly, then configured OpenVPN to run them on connecting/disconnecting.

It’s possible it could be a box checked or config option in Mullvad that broke it by not fixing DNS on it’s way down?

OP also said they don’t fully remember what was done, so they may have disabled systemd-resolved or installed openresolv or who knows what else.

Fortunately, in this case, they should be able to follow the systemd-resolved docs from the beginning to end up with it working.

127.0.0.53 is the local stub used by systemd-resolved, so OP should pull this thread and comb the docs. If systemd-resolved is installed and not being used, it will cause conflicts with openresolv (most likely alternative).

Lina Khan has a snowball’s chance in the FTC under Trump.

I sync important files to s3 from a folder with awscli. Dot files and projects are in a private git repos. That’s it.

If I maintained a server, I would do something more sophisticated, but installation is so dead simple these days that I could get a daily driver in working order very quickly.