2026-02-13 20:23 UTC
@monsieuricon@social.kernel.org @mhoye@cosocial.ca Could you kindly tell me why parts of the internet would break if this went down? How does stuff roughly rely on this? And what kind of site would break? Something like a couple of distro sites? Or a bunch of major global services?
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@monsieuricon@social.kernel.org 2026-02-13 20:36
@hackillu@mas.to A surprising number of services hardcode mirrors.kernel.org as the source where they can obtain packages for deployments. They really shouldn't, but they do. Last time there was an extended outage on our side, a lab technician from a major EU hospital emailed me to say that it broke their ability to use some kind of lab equipment because it somehow required downloading a perl package from our CPAN mirror. Should we start occasionally breaking mirrors.kernel.org so that people identify and fix these dependencies? Maybe. But I'm slightly terrified of unintended consequences that may impact real people's lives.