Privacy

7204 readers

7 users here now

A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy

Rules:

Be civil
No spam posting
Keep posts on-topic
No trolling

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

iopq@lemmy.world

Question about self-hosting SearxNG (lemmy.today)

submitted 3 weeks ago by hansolo@lemmy.today to c/privacy@lemmy.world

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Novocirab@feddit.org 2 points 3 weeks ago

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.