vh
1a35181b67
Reverts the outgoing.proxies block added in156e126. Canonical restored from that commit's parent and verified byte-identical to the host's searxng-settings.yml.pre-esh-20260917 backup, then deployed via scripts/deploy-stack.sh so canonical and host converge rather than drift. The esh-scale searxng-egress.service is stopped and disabled; tailscaled on that container was not touched. ⚠ THE ROLLBACK DID NOT RESTORE THE ENGINES, WHICH FALSIFIES THE REASON GIVEN FOR IT.156e126recorded that moving egress to ESH had cost three of four engines. Measured after this revert, with egress confirmed back on 70.230.226.88 and the same instrument used for the before-measurement, the result is identical: brave and startpage suspended, duckduckgo CAPTCHA, google cse the only engine answering. Per-engine bang probes confirm duckduckgo is CAPTCHA-ing the residential address live, so this is not a stale suspension timer. The engine failures therefore have some other cause and predate or are independent of the ESH move. The claim in156e126asserted causation from a correlation without measuring the pre-change state; the only evidence for "residential egress avoids CAPTCHAs" was a comment dated 2026-09-03, which is no longer true of this address. The revert still stands on its own merits: ESH egress bought no measurable improvement while adding a hard dependency on ESH WAN and mesh availability for all fleet search, so the simpler configuration is the better one. It is simply not the fix for the engines. README rewritten to match: direct NH3 is documented as current, the ESH attempt is kept as history with its measured outcome, and the health script's blind spot is called out — scripts/searxng-health.sh prints a passing result while three engines are blocked, because it gates on "any results returned" and treats failed engines as informational. That script needs to fail on blocked engines before any future egress change, or the next regression is equally invisible.
searxng
Privacy-respecting metasearch. Runs on nh3-docker (10.100.50.40:9996,
searxng.nh3.internal), and is exposed to every Claude Code session on nh3-dev
as the web_search MCP tool.
Current egress: direct from NH3
Hosting and egress are both nh3-docker. Outbound search requests leave from
70.230.226.88, NH3's residential address, with no proxy in outgoing:.
This is the configuration that works; the section below records why, and the
one after it records an attempt to change it that failed.
The ESH egress experiment (2026-09-17 → reverted 2026-09-18)
Search egress was moved to socks5h://10.0.50.65:1080 on esh-scale
(CT 108 on esh-pve) — an application-level proxy, no host route or exit-node
changes. Reverted after one day: it cost three of the four engines.
Measured 2026-09-18 across five queries (two ad-hoc plus all three in
scripts/searxng-health.sh), identical every time:
brave Suspended: too many requests
duckduckgo CAPTCHA
startpage Suspended: CAPTCHA
google cse 20 results <- the only engine answering
The cause is the one this stack already knew about. SearXNG runs at NH3
because its residential egress avoids the CAPTCHA gating that gets applied
to datacenter ranges; routing out through ESH (128.177.138.182 when
measured, 154.50.58.126 at cutover — ESH's WAN address moves) gave that
property up. The Dependency note written at cutover called the risk and it
materialised.
⚠ The failure was invisible to both health checks. /healthz cannot see
it, and scripts/searxng-health.sh — the script this README told you to run
instead — prints ✓ searching in this exact state, because it gates on "did
any results come back" and treats failed engines as informational. Search ran
on one engine for a day with every instrument reporting healthy. If egress is
ever changed again, fix the script to fail on blocked engines first, or the
next regression is equally silent.
The proxy side was built correctly and none of this was its fault: microsocks
ran as nobody under searxng-egress.service, bound 10.0.50.65:1080 only,
and allowed source 10.100.50.40 alone. The canonical unit is kept at
configs/esh-scale/searxng-egress.service
in case a future egress experiment wants it; the service is disabled on
esh-scale.
Historical placement: NH3 rather than the colo
Measured 2026-09-03:
ana-docker egress 38.120.12.42 datacenter -> DuckDuckGo/Startpage CAPTCHA
nh3-docker egress 70.230.226.88 residential -> no gate on that account
Search engines gate datacenter ranges. Running the aggregator from the
residential-egress site was the original approach. The operator subsequently
requested ESH egress; outgoing.proxies now explicitly selects it as above.
⚠ It is not a complete fix: brave, duckduckgo and startpage still
CAPTCHA from here. google cse carries general search at ~20 results/query, and
yandex, wiby, github, stackoverflow and marginalia all work. General
search is therefore effectively single-engine — if google cse breaks, the
instance goes quiet, which is exactly the failure below.
⚠ /healthz cannot tell you whether search works
On 2026-09-03 the old ana-docker instance was found returning zero results for every query, for an unknown number of weeks, while:
- the container reported
healthyfor 7 straight days, 0 restarts; - the Homepage card was green;
/healthzreturned 200 every 30 seconds.
It was running 2026.4.17 while current was 2026.9.3 — 4.5 months of engine
scrapers rotting against sites that had changed their markup. :latest means
"latest at pull time", and nothing re-pulls on its own.
Proven by experiment before touching anything: the new image, same settings file, same host, same query returned 20 results where the running one returned 0.
scripts/searxng-health.sh asserts the property, not the mechanism — three
unrelated queries must each return results > 0. Run it after any change, and
periodically; it is the only thing that catches rot.
Update
ssh infra-ops@nh3-docker 'cd /opt/docker/compose/searxng && \
sudo docker compose pull && sudo docker compose up -d'
scripts/searxng-health.sh
The MCP tool
services/searxng-mcp/ — installed with uv tool install and registered at
user scope (claude mcp add --scope user searxng searxng-mcp), so every
Claude Code session gets web_search with no per-project setup.
⚠ Zero results raise an error rather than returning an empty list. An empty list is indistinguishable from a broken aggregator, and that ambiguity is what let the old instance fail silently for weeks. Same reasoning as althing's "an unreachable post office is an OUTAGE, never an empty inbox".
⚠ Written against mcp 2.x, where FastMCP became MCPServer and the v1
@app.list_tools() decorator API is gone. v1 examples fail at import with
'Server' object has no attribute 'list_tools'.
⚠ uv tool install --force alone served a cached build and silently
reinstalled the old code — the installed file still had the v1 API after the
source no longer did. --reinstall --no-cache was required, and the check that
caught it was md5sum of source vs installed.
Secret
SEARXNG_SECRET lives in /opt/docker/compose/searxng/.env (0600, root) on the
host and is vaulted at nh3-docker/searxng-secret. Never in git.