Donald E Haselwood wrote:
>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!).
>
You must be dreaming or living a charm life if you are NOT getting download failures.
My results from a T1 line in Clearwater was something on the order of 1 out of 5 CDs failed.
>
>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.
>
I have a IBM Thinkpad laptop which I am trying to put SuSE 10.1 on. Most laptops these days have win modems. Most win modem software is not open source. Some is some isn't. Being lazie and not wanting to worry with adding win modem software to a SuSE distribution I purchased the commerical version in which this supposely already setup in. I can not install the commerical version. All indications are the disks are corrupt and these are diske directly from SuSE.
As far as you check sum response that sounds about right. I saw months go by with no errors in download check sumes followed by weeks of trash downloads and error failures. I successfully downloaded Asiaonix, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Scientific Linux, one or two others I do not recall. I made several attempts to download Sun and numerous attempts with Debiam neith of which would ever install EVEN THOUGH THE CK SUMS WERE CORRECT.
For those of you not aware of it Scientific Linux is 100% Red Hat Enterprise and is much more stable than Fedora.
>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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