cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/35487250
I’m looking at self-hosting SearXNG. I have an old Win 11 machine and figure this might be the only way it can be useful.
Two questions I haven’t seen answered so far:
I would be hosting on my own home network, which is on a VPN 24/7, but for added privacy my devices are sometimes on VPN connections to other IPs. So I need to know the external IP of the instance to be able to find it. Are there any added measures I should put in place to prevent randoms looking at IPs or port scanning from finding the instance and going to town?
If this is on my home network anyway, are there any risks of data leaking or triangulation of, say, referrals or image searches that would just point back to my home network?
My threat model is for big tech to leave me alone, so it’s not exactly huge stakes, but I also don’t want to bother self-hosting if added complexity makes it not worth it.
As a semi-simple compromise it would be cool if there was some way to have the cycling between different Searx instances be done automatically. E.g. either as a browser feature/browser extension, or as some private self-hosted interface to which I send my requests and which then selects the server at random from some subset of the list on searx.space. Or, while a bit hacky, the easiest way could be to do this on the DNS level. Should be doable with just one or two existing tools, with standard tools even.