this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2026
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Privacy
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If you do any self-hosting, hosting your own instance of SearXNG is a much better way to go. No AI and you actually get results for what you search for. It pulls results from all the other search engines and you can choose which engines you want in settings, and it masks your IP so the other search engines don't see where the requests actually come from. But even if you don't self-host, SearXNG is just a much better privacy respecting search engine anyway.
There is a new Linux distro that includes hardened Zen browser and a tool to set up SearXNG locally. There is also an option to have the searches run through three TOR relays. It makes it all super easy to setup if you’re not someone who is self-hosting other services.
Hmmmm, interesting. What is the name of this distro, if you don't mind me asking.
Odyssey Linux https://odysseylinux.org/
I just started self hosting a Nextcloud instance and I’m absolutely going to look into using Searx on it now. I forgot that was a possibility.
Be careful; one project turns into two, which turns into 3, which turns into a lifestyle! I use searXNG and have a wireguard instance into my LAN so that I can access the nth service I just set up that I cannot believe I have been living without when I am away from the LAN!
May I also suggest pihole be in your list of things to try out, or adguard home if that is they way you swing I will not judge. Once you get your ad blocking setup you will really start noticing the ads in other places and you will then need to go further into ad blocking, when you decide to get your own domain name may I suggest you find a provider that offers a wildcard email option, if you need a free trial service just a little longer create a new account with a new email address or if something gets spammy just have things sent to that address either bounced and deleted or just deleted before it gets to your inbox.
Actually two turns into four! Otherwise I agree with your reply. :-) My next step for searXNG would be to set it up on a low powered device to access from public (for myself only), and use a VPN on it with rotating IPs. To accessing it outside my home. But I'm not ready for that yet. I'm also kind of scared to get hacked someday.
I am a dumb ass with a BA in the social sciences not computer science, but I was able to get a vanilla OpenWRT installed on a Flint 2 firewall. Sure I did a lot of reading, youtubing, and got a little AI help. The Flint 2 comes with OpenWRT installed on it but everything I read suggested putting a clean install.
I had a slow start to home labbing I started with one pihole than moved to two, than I thought about getting a VPN running but that did not really work I believe I even tried using duckDNS for that but than I did the dumbest thing anyone can do I opened port 22 in my firewall so that I could SSH in. When my internet mystiralisly stopped working correctly I called up my ISP and wow did I ever learn that opening port 22 was a bad idea for how I had it set up at the time. So that stopped me exploring homelabbing for a while, sure after I had new pi installs set up it was never project after project but I never used port 22 again (until recently now that I have crowdsec running) and never used passwordless login. But earlier this year my place flooded and I was out of my home more frequently so I needed to find a way that I could access my pihole and smb (I had given up on using nextcloud at that point but I think I am coming back around to it), so came the Flint 2. With OpenWRT the 3 or 4 projects turned into an infinite number of possibilities.
Oh man sorry to hear your place got flooded. That sucks, but good on you for not stop trying. Man also, you can't just do a passwordless login when dealing with the internet. :D And the story with misconfiguring the port is exactly one of the things I'm scared.
NextCloud is also on my todo list,... but I'm too lazy.
Thanks but this girl has nice new flooring and a new hobby/way of life! I would disagree with you on passwordless log in, do it where ever you can but use ssh-keys and change ports away from 22.
I really do not like using ports in the 8080 range either but I think that is because of my 22 issue.
And then you find Home Assistant and don't stop until you literally have the lights automatically be precisely on you and only you, wherever you go in your house.
I am in some self hosting lemmy group, I was given so much heck for still using ring, I needed to fix a motion sensor flood light when I figured it out and told people what I had done I got so many downvotes.
I get it ring is not good, but I have a vLAN (10.6.66.0/24) that does not have access to the WAN.
I run my containers through Tailscale to be able to access my services away from home. But yes, you're right one container turns into adding another container and on and on. But its a better way than depending on other services that spy and track, etc. I still have a lot that I need to learn and add to the server but for the most part it accomplishes everything I want when I decided to start a server.
I use wireguard on my openWRT firewall, any ISP firewall/modem/router is a joke.
Yeah, I actually want to learn to build my own router and learn to set up openWRT, etc. Its a fairly new field to me but I know its something I need to learn. ISP routers are definitely a joke.
ISP routers are also a security issue, when that PHP thing happened I had to go through all my stuff and find what was vulnerable and either update it or replace it, luckily nothing on my firewall was affected. When sshole was the big scare I went and looked everything up on it to make sure I was not in trouble, I wasn’t I use keys with password authentication turned off, but that got me thinking I should see if there are any updates for my firewall. Turns out there were a few, I had never thought of updating a firewall before because the only times my ISP firewall would have been updated is when I broke something and the IT people would just decide to do their thing and break all of my configs, there may have been updates with that.
I saw that that sshole issue was really only an issue for people running older out of date systems, is that true?
I know I have a long road to travel learning the router, networking, security stuff but it is a road I will travel as I find time.
I do not entirely understand how the sshole works either, but yes I believe it does have something to do with some old thing where the attacker would just have to put in some stupid long password and some ssh protocol would let it in. Most of my homelab uses openssh, I do not believe this had that issue I have keys with password auth turned off so you need my keys to get in, OpenWRT uses DropBear and that did not have the issue.
From what I understand the sshole was a big nothing burger.
Yeah, that's what I gathered from the videos I watched about it, but better to be safe than sorry and just double check.
Just wait until you start learning about reverse proxies!
Yep, highly recommend it. Its easy to setup, especially if you already know a little about self-hosting.
What should someone who has got 0 idea of how to even start self hosting, start with?
I just looked up YouTube videos on using docker compose when I started. Also https://trash-guides.info/ has some great information. Services you want to use like Jellyfin for example has documents and good information for setting it up. I use docker compose so I would start with their website.