Why are Linux distributions hosted on multiple mirror servers that they don't own? 1) money 2) availability 3) trust 4) security 1) If you don't have a lot of

Why are Linux distributions hosted on multiple mirror servers that they don't own? 1) money 2) availability 3) trust 4) security 1) If you don't have a lot of money, you take the servers you can get. Donated mirrors means you don't have to pay the bandwidth or hosting bills. 2) If you have multiple servers, it's less likely that one server going down will tank your project. When GitHub, AWS, or even Level3 has an outage, Linux distros keep on chugging like nothing happened. Traditional server maintenance is also easier when everyone can just switch to a different server. 3) Maintainers can use their PGP keys to create signed packages and downloads. Their public keys are distributed on mirrors, as well as embedded in the downloads they've signed. Once downloaded by users, the distribution can verify its own integrity. But how does the user know they started with the real maintainers' public key? The public key is distributed on a hundred geographically-distributed servers all owned by different people; the user can check them all. So other than compromising a maintainer's key, it's logistically impossible to compromise end-user security. (this one is more Linux-specific than IRC-specific) 4) If you only have one server & it gets compromised, it can be hard to tell. By comparing its operating state to the other servers, you can sometimes more quickly identify the compromise. And if you do find a compromise, you can remove the compromised server quickly, close the hole on the other servers, and start regenerating keys. It's an eventuality every large project should be prepared for, and IRC servers do get compromised. Linux mirrors don't matter in this regard, but the build servers etc do matter. IRC comes from the same time and place, and has some (but not all) of the same considerations.