Superb!
I am planning to start studying Japanese. I always install duo lingo and then find it too basic and not worth it and I stop using it all together.
I have had bad luck in the past where my drive would not spin up at boot for some reason. I end up modifying the fstab file with a live boot USB and then start the system with revised FSTAB.
Just my 2 cents that would help in case of a dead lock situation.
Can you reach other services on that vm? If you don't know that then test this first. ( May be run a python http service to test this?)