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.
vh
156e12619d