Hi,
could we drop fpaste from the default installations? I think it’s unnecessary and glued to something quite legacy (last commit 2019) CentOS pastebin online service. If I need pastebin service, I search my own and use it.
Isn’t it better to have something for people to use which points to a system in our ecosystem which we have some relation to? Not that the CentOS one is immune to spam, but we can at least take it as signal that it’s probably a legit link.
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I disagree to drop it. fpaste easy to upload and use. instead of looking “online” I just use fpaste and move on. It is simple and easy. We may look better updated paste service but %100 NOT want to drop it.
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Dropping fpaste would entail a rewrite of documentation. I remember it being mentioned frequently on IRC/Matrix as well for an easy way for users to provide system information with fpaste --sysinfo.
Just because it hasn’t seen any recent activity doesn’t mean it’s outdated or useless. Compare fpaste to telnet, which has an upstream link that takes you right to the Wayback Machine. Yet, it still has its legitimate use cases.
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The only negative point I see while using fpaste for supporting is, the time span of one day (keeping online) seams to be to short if there is a bigger problem who takes more than 24 hours to solve.
The idea of keeping data online for a short time is that we not have to worrier and clean up our requests, right?
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fpaste maintainer here. So, first there are two parts to it. There’s the client which is actively developed—I just made a new release with fixes recently. The other is the “server” that this client pastes to. The server has not been touched recently because, well, it works, and the infrastructure team have had no reason to play with it (if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it).
Now, fpaste is not meant to be used as a general pastebin service. There are plenty of those around. Yes, it does support that function, but it is primarily used as a debugging tool. That’s sort of why the pastebin we use limits posts to only 24 hours. The package description says:
It is often useful to be able to easily paste text to the Fedora Pastebin at http://paste.fedoraproject.org and this simple script will do that and return the resulting URL so that people may examine the output. This can hopefully help folks who are for some reason stuck without X, working remotely, or any other reason they may be unable to paste something into the pastebin.
This is not a general client for paste servers. It will only ever support the
paste server that the Fedora community is running.
The most used feature of fpaste is the --sysinfo flag. Try: fpaste --sysinfo --printonly. We also have options that provide lots of information about btrfs installations now and so on (see the manual.
Given how tiny it is, I see no reason to remove it. If one doesn’t want to use it, they can remove it. When helping folks on #fedora@libera (and now the matrix channel), being able to ask folks who may not even have display working to give us the output of fpaste --sysinfo is very useful as an initial step. In fact, there are lots of times here that we request people to provide this output.
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The hero fpaster arrived :))
Could you increase that time to 1 week?
24 hours may be fine for a chat, but not a forum.
It is often not possible to find enough spare time to reply on the same day since people live in different time zones, and have own life, work, duties, etc.
In addition, sometimes we need a few more days to collect additional info and then take a step back to review the diagnostics to analyze the issue in a new light.
I don’t administer it, so I cannot. You can file an issue with the infra team to see what they say. The issue with extending the period is the capacity for abuse, and the legal issues with stuff being put on the pastebin when it’s abused as file storage.
Usually, on forums, one can paste text directly or upload files—do you need a pastebin for forums? Folks can just go fpaste --sysinfo --printonly and then copy paste the output?
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You might wanna update that. It’s redirecting to https://paste.centos.org/ and has been for a long time.
I did and I saw that the output is missing a newline at the end resulting in:
Gathering system info ..............................[penguinpee@urras ~] $
Time to file a bug I guess. 
The first redirects to the second. It used to be fpaste.org a long time ago when fpaste was still set up and managed by the “Fedora Unity” project (if I remember correctly).
$ curl -iIL paste.fedoraproject.org
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 22:15:19 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: https://paste.fedoraproject.org/
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
HTTP/2 302
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
x-content-type-options: nosniff
referrer-policy: same-origin
location: https://paste.centos.org/
content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
date: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 22:15:20 GMT
server: Apache
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 22:15:20 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.53 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) OpenSSL/3.0.7
X-Powered-By: PHP/8.0.27
Pragma:
Cache-Control:
Expires: Thu, 14 Sep 2023 22:15:20 GMT
Set-Cookie: stikked=iolns6hd4jvuabnrp6nrjrqus2bijcue; expires=Fri, 22-Sep-2023 22:15:20 GMT; Max-Age=86400; path=/; HttpOnly
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-Xss-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Referrer-Policy: same-origin
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
I wouldn’t recommend removing a tool that allows sysadmins a way of
sending terminal outputs to an online space for sharing. Fpaste has
been handy for OOB troubleshooting on server editions. Rather than
removing it, a replacement is better (otherwise, just leave it).
Regards
Onyeibo
2 Likes
+1
fpaste is not used much when all goes well. But if something doesn’t go well, especially in the graphical stack and you have not very experienced users of the Fedora Workstation facing the command line, fpaste is the most effective tool how you can ask them to show you the logs.
The most classical situation is:
user updated the system, nvidia driver broke and user is logged into a text terminal.
user has a phone and uses this phone to join one of the online communities to help.
People in the chat or at Fedora Ask try to help and request logs, but logs are on the machine and user can not easily copy them to the phone.
fpaste in such cases is super helpful, so that you don’t have to deal with blurred photos of the screen to debug an issue.
1 Like
I guess we pretty much answer this question very clearly and majority of people in comments wants to not remove so I guess we can safely lock this discussion and conclude that, the answer is “no”
what do you think guys @gui1ty @ankursinha @bookwar @mattdm ?
1 Like