Canonical Is Shutting Down Ubuntu Pastebin (nerds.xyz) 27
"Canonical says Ubuntu Pastebin will be decommissioned at the end of May 2026," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, "as part of an infrastructure modernization effort."
The announcement only appeared this week, giving the Linux community barely any warning before a service that has been tied to Ubuntu support culture for years suddenly disappears.
Ubuntu Pastebin has long been used for sharing logs, crash reports, config files, and terminal output across IRC, Ask Ubuntu, forums, bug reports, Reddit, and countless troubleshooting guides scattered around the internet. The bigger concern is link rot. Once the shutdown happens, years of old support discussions could lose critical debugging information overnight. Community members have already pointed out that some Ubuntu packages and scripts still reference paste.ubuntu.com directly.
While it is understandable that aging services eventually get retired, the extremely short transition period is rubbing many Linux users the wrong way, especially in a community where old documentation and archived troubleshooting threads still regularly help people solve problems a decade later.
Ubuntu Pastebin has long been used for sharing logs, crash reports, config files, and terminal output across IRC, Ask Ubuntu, forums, bug reports, Reddit, and countless troubleshooting guides scattered around the internet. The bigger concern is link rot. Once the shutdown happens, years of old support discussions could lose critical debugging information overnight. Community members have already pointed out that some Ubuntu packages and scripts still reference paste.ubuntu.com directly.
While it is understandable that aging services eventually get retired, the extremely short transition period is rubbing many Linux users the wrong way, especially in a community where old documentation and archived troubleshooting threads still regularly help people solve problems a decade later.
Responsible action (Score:3)
Canonical should pay the Internet Archive to keep a read only copy available.
Do not rely on untracked/out-of-band documentation (Score:2)
Canonical should pay the Internet Archive to keep a read only copy available.
Better, yet, it seems that projects that rely on paste.bin discussions should have been using a source control repository to keep them.
People need to treat discussions as the "live" part of technical documentation (which opens another can of worms, obviously.) But, if it is not source-controlled, assume it is ephemeral, or that it doesn't exist.
This also applies to stuff we cite in Stack Overflow. It's handy to cite a finding when documenting a code change, hack, or design decision based on an answer fo
They should leave it running read-only (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
A solution so obvious, one wonders why Canonical aren't adopting it. Even if they did that though, a week (and one which includes a Federal holiday) is totally insufficient.
I suppose it is better than what the current US Administration does, "we shuttered this service yesterday".
Re: (Score:2)
Seems very redundant (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, aren't there plenty [pastes.io] of [privatebin.info] sites [github.com] which [jsfiddle.net] offer [ideone.com] pretty [pastebin.com] much [justpaste.app] the [tailscale.com] same [hastebin.com] thing [rentry.co]?
New admins (Score:4, Interesting)
The new admins don't know how to maintain a simple file server anymore.
They can vibe code something else to use the power though.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah sorry but that's a scenario that only happens in your head, especially given how a simple file server could actually be admin'd by a simple LLM manual. Look for another article to rage at the young generation rather than making up scenarios irrelevant to this one.
Re: New admins (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It's a bunch of text files. Code snippets and log extracts. How large can it possibly be? They could probably serve the entire thing with an older Raspberry Pi and a 32Gb microSD card. If that's outside the budget, they can save the money by firing the person who says that less than $100 worth of hardware is outside the budget.
Remember the cloud is "somebody else's computer" (Score:3)
It was a mistake to depend on the generosity and goodwill of companies for the long term.
Don't get me wrong. Ubuntu used to be awesome. They had a mission, and they believed in it. They even were distributing free Linux CD-ROMs when I was in college. They had it all together.
But now they are just another corporate entity, and "pastebin" is a service with no revenue potential. I'm surprised it survived so long.
The replacement? Github Gists? A peer to peer system?
There are of course "alternatives", but I'm not sure any of them can be trusted more than "ephemeral" shares:
https://github.com/lorien/awes... [github.com]
Re: (Score:2)
But now they are just another corporate entity, and "pastebin" is a service with no revenue potential.
It has marketing value. Most such services are paid for with ads. It's their opportunity to show ads without paying for placement, by running a very lightweight and low cost service. Apparently they no longer think that's worth it, which is weird.
Not good, but good to know. (Score:5, Interesting)
And funny that this coincides with my starting to move my servers from Ubuntu Server to Debian. I don't want to trust a company that, on May 22, announces the shutdown of a service on May 31 that was supposed to store data for up to one year (guaranteed or not)...
Think of the cost! (Score:3)
This is probably costing Canonical $42B/year to keep operating. Better to put their resources on other options, such as putting more packages into snaps.
My bad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: My bad (Score:2)
s/four/five/g
Re: (Score:3)
Microsoft shuts down Windows all the time. I wouldn't get too excited if Canonical starts doing it to Ubuntu too.
This is stupid (Score:3)
It can't hardly cost anything to at least just render it down to static pages and leave it there.
Frankly, it shouldn't cost much to keep it running, either. What it does is very simple. They should be able to migrate that functionality to whatever new site paradigm they are using now trivially, because it is trivial.
What Ubuntu is really saying here is that they're incompetent, because even a hobbyist with a vanity site could do what they can't. Is some company that shit at the web one you want to trust with your business, when they do so much through the web? womp fucking womp.
Canonical has left themselves (Score:3)
Re: Canonical has left themselves (Score:2)
Become Redhat? Seems like they are still pursuing that dream, albeit with contributions to the Linux ecosystem that are much less useful.
Re: (Score:2)
Right, redhate gives us libvirt, canonical gives us... snap.
OTOH redhate violates the GPL on an ongoing basis by placing additional restrictions on the licensed code, canonical not so much.
From People Holding Hands to Corportate Thugs (Score:2)
Open source the pastebin code (Score:2)
Ubuntu can shut down the service itself, but I'd like to see them post the code open-source.
This might actually be a good thing (Score:1)
One of the most toxic aspects of the broader linux community is a refusal to ever actually provide proper documentation or even fixes for tons of things and instead simply demanding people search through decades of obscure forum threads and mailing lists. This could force ubuntu to actually get its shit together.