My workplace has a VPN that I need to connect occasionally, but normally do not. I want to set up a prominent, unignorable status notifier so when I am connected to it, I am highly aware and have to disconnect to make the status clear.

Originally I thought maybe I’d like to find a way to query the status of tun0 and turn my main panel #FF0000, but I am having a hard time finding information on how to change panel color programatically. My other idea was assigning a hotkey to open a terminal window with a profile that has a red background and executes a shell script to run the VPN connect script in the foreground, but that feel super hacky and I’d love something cleaner.

Any ideas?