What has been your experience with md5sums? Until yesterday I figured that
checking them was to a) verify that the file wasn't counterfeit, or b)
satisfy a prissy accounting type of mentality. I assumed that the odds of a
wrong md5sum on a legitmate downloaded file, where there were no apparent
problems during the download, would be something in the realm of winning the
lottery. Apparently, not so (or maybe I should have been playing the lottery
rather than downloading Suse!).
I downloaded Suse 10.1 SLED, burned the cd's, and started the install. The
1st cd went OK, but none of the others worked. I then downloaded Suse 10.1
open source. Before the open source install starts a screen for checking the
media came up so I ran all the cd's. The SLED cd's 2-5 came up "wrong".
Figuring it must be a burner problem, I burned new ones, this time with the
file on the same machine rather over my lan. All but #4 were OK, so burning
was a problem. I burned #4 again. Still bad.
I re-downloaded SLED cd4, and burned the cd. It checked "wrong." Puzzled, I
then md5sum'ed the two cd4 downloads. They are different. I go to the Suse
site and download cd4 a 3rd time, and md5sum the file. It is different from
the previous two downloads, but this time the burned CD checks "OK". I go
back to the Suse site and discover that by scrolling down the screen they
have the md5sums for the files. Indeed, downloads 1 & 2 don't match and 3 is
OK. Net, 1 out of 3 downloads were wrong (and the file sizes were all
exactly the same). For a test I tried downloaded a 4th time. The 4th
download was OK.
While I wasn't too surprised by the errors in the cd burning, I would have
never dreamed that getting two corrupted downloads of the same file was even
remotely likely when everything else looked good,.
Don
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