this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
21 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy

7204 readers
7 users here now

A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy

Rules:

  1. Be civil
  2. No spam posting
  3. Keep posts on-topic
  4. No trolling

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
iopq@lemmy.world
21
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:

  1. 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?

  2. 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
[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh, I wouldn't know about that terrible Windows thing (more than I must). A deb distro is my daily driver, so I was thinking about doing what you're saying as a more portable alternative that moves easily with any VPN location.

How resource-intensive is your setup?

[–] MalReynolds@piefed.social 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Cool, you said 'old Win 11 machine', I assumed. It's really not intensive, never know it's there. I guess it's a VPN, a few curls, some stats and a light webserver ?

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 1 points 3 weeks ago

Oh yeah, sorry, that's just the old paperwight I had lying around, not my baby.