Committing work deployed on 2026-09-17 that had been left uncommitted, so
canonical intent stops disagreeing with the running host. The deployed
/opt/docker/conf/searxng/searxng-settings.yml is byte-identical to the
canonical file here, verified before this commit.
Search requests and their DNS now exit via socks5h://10.0.50.65:1080 on
esh-scale (CT 108), an application-level proxy rather than a host-wide exit
node; no route or firewall changes. microsocks runs as nobody under
searxng-egress.service, binds only 10.0.50.65:1080, and bypasses SOCKS auth
for source 10.100.50.40 alone — every other source must supply a password
regenerated at each start and never distributed. Verified active and enabled.
There is deliberately no direct-NH3 fallback: an ESH outage must fail the
search rather than silently revert egress.
⚠ THE CHANGE HAS NOT ACHIEVED ITS PURPOSE AS DEPLOYED. Two independent live
queries, 2026-09-18, both report brave "Suspended: too many requests",
duckduckgo "CAPTCHA" and startpage "Suspended: CAPTCHA", leaving google cse
as the only answering engine. Moving egress off NH3's residential address is
what this change did, and CAPTCHA avoidance was the stated reason searxng sits
at NH3 at all. The README anticipated the risk in its Dependency note; it has
materialised. Rollback procedure is in the README and the pre-change config is
kept on the host as searxng-settings.yml.pre-esh-20260917.
Measured egress also drifted from the value recorded at cutover: the README
notes 154.50.58.126, the proxy now exits 128.177.138.182. Expected — the README
pins no public IP and calls out WAN failover — but recorded here so the number
in the doc is not mistaken for current.
Also retargets seat-inventory.py's default host from the mesh address
100.64.0.7 to fv-ml1's LAN address 10.251.50.54, routed by the site gateway.
The ana-docker instance was returning zero results for every query while
reporting healthy — 4.5 months stale (2026.4.17 against a current 2026.9.3),
its engine scrapers rotted against sites that had changed. /healthz proves
the web app answers and says nothing about whether search works, so seven
days of green sat on top of a search box that found nothing.
Moved to nh3-docker rather than updated in place, because the colo egress is
the other half of the problem: 38.120.12.42 is a datacenter address that
DuckDuckGo and Startpage CAPTCHA, while nh3-docker egresses residentially at
70.230.226.88. Same reasoning as the fleet's residential proxy for yt-dlp,
applied at the source instead of around it.
Config corrected along the way: base_url said searxng.pfi.local, a name
retired on 2026-08-19, while the environment said something else — the env
won so nothing broke and the file quietly lied. The karmasearch.videos
removal key never matched, because the engine's real name has a space.
scripts/searxng-health.sh asserts results > 0 across three unrelated
queries. That is the check that would have caught this, and the only kind
that can: the mechanism was healthy throughout.
services/searxng-mcp exposes it as `web_search` at user scope, so every
Claude Code session has it. Zero results raise rather than returning an
empty list — an empty list is indistinguishable from a broken aggregator,
which is precisely how this hid.
Old instance stopped and removed; DNS alias repointed to searxng.nh3.internal.
vh