October 30: Outline Managers Meetup
 |
- Date: October 30, 2024
- Who: Outline Team
Notes
The Outline team is actively developing a centralized website for developers, consolidating documentation and resources in one place. For questions or feedback, they encourage users to join the Outline Mattermost channel on the TCU server, as Reddit is a public platform. An announce-only mailing list, managed by TCU, is also available for updates.
.To assist the team and community, Outline encourages users to perform their own measurements. This helps the Outline team and other users gain valuable insights.
The team is also working on solutions for scalable and resilient service deployment, which they will share soon, along with updates on SDK changes. These updates will allow users to implement new strategies on the server and integrating intralogic. They would love to receive and incorporate more contributions for the SDK.
Community Feedback and Enhancements
Outline has acknowledged the community’s requests for SDK partnerships, training, and financial support. In response, they plan to expand resources on their website soon. They have also provided guidance on non-graphical UI setups. To support service providers looking for additional resources, Outline is developing a marketplace where organizations can offer servers to others, helping to offset costs.
Technical Improvements and Security
Outline employs Shadowsocks, widely used in regions like China, with enhancements for resilience. Currently, Outline faces blocking through two main methods:
- Allowlisting by censors.
- Traffic volume analysis, though this area requires further research. Mixing proxies and tunnels can help address these vulnerabilities. Although Outline has a low barrier to entry, users should protect their server IP addresses and keep keys secure. For high-risk users, Tor offers additional anonymity. Outline is an access tool rather than a privacy tool, designed to enable content access with lower detection risk than VPNs. Users can layer tools like Tor Browser with Outline for added security, although threat models vary.
Strategies to Limit User Linkages
To minimize connections between users, providers can set up different Outline servers for individual users or even specific business trips. Servers are affordable and easy to create on-demand, making them suitable for short-term or individual use. Multiple entities now offer users access to Outline.
Setup Resources and Prefixing
Currently, the Outline Manager does not support prefix setups directly. As a small team, Outline prioritizes tasks they only they can do and relies on the community to address other challenges. Certain Outline providers can and are helping with prefix setups, however; They also shared the following resources:
Server Decentralization and Management
Outline providers are often based outside repressive regions, who set up servers for end-users. While Outline Manager doesn’t offer decentralized management, some providers run multiple servers linked to a central server via API, allowing flexible key management. They hope that a community member will invest time in creating a reusable key management, given that the Outline Team does not have alot of bandwidth.
Future Roadmap and Mobile Management
Some users have requested a configuration server to avoid requiring each user to install a manager client. Outline agrees that a mobile, web-based manager would be ideal. However, setting up domain-based certificates is challenging, as servers often lack domain names at setup. The team is also developing an Outline server based on the Caddy server platform, which allows for a manager web app that can communicate with the server directly.
Recommendations for Growth, Resilience and Scability
For scalability, they recommend expanding one machine incrementally and using IP assignment features without server resets. OkThanks did a report looking at different ways individuals and organizations have used the Outline technology to scale. https://okthanks.com/blog/2024/4/9/growing-with-the-people
Outline in Network Restrictions and Greyouts
In regards to how Outline works during greyouts, if they are blocking the network, there is not much you can do. In places where the outside Internet is blocked, but there is an internal intranet, you can setup a multi-hop system. You can run a server that has access to the outside. Its complicated, but it can be done.
