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vh 1a35181b67 revert(searxng): return search egress to direct NH3

Reverts the outgoing.proxies block added in 156e126. 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. 156e126 recorded 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 in 156e126 asserted 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.

2026-09-18 12:34:52 -07:00

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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 healthy for 7 straight days, 0 restarts;
the Homepage card was green;
/healthz returned 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.

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