rsync corrupting files downloaded from ftp1.sourceforge.net

[Jameson Burt <jameson@monumental.com>]

I use "rsync" to mirror most of i386 Debian Linux.
This has worked well for a year until the last few days.
I tried to correct some oddly working packages that I had recently upgraded,
but apt-get noticed that the locally downloaded Packages.gz files were corrupted,
which I affirm by hand,
   gunzip: Packages.gz: invalid compressed data--format violated


Checking the source of the Packages.gz files, I used a command line rsync for one file, 
rsync -vt rsync://ftp1.sourceforge.net/debian/dists/woody/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz  .
This downloaded Packages.gz that "gunzip" could unzip.
For example,  dists/testing/non-free/binary-i386/Packages.gz  had length  64,902
However, before my single file rsync, my nightly batched-rsync Packages.gz size was 88,035.
Restarting the batched-rsync, the new Packages.gz became 81,726 which is still not correct.
However, if I remove Packages.gz from my archives, then a batched-rsync
downloads Packages.gz correctly with 64,902 bytes.

Of course, I don't know how long I have had this underlying problem.
I first noticed it this week.
Could this be a problem with "rsync" or were there kernel problems so my filesystem is going bad, or ...?
Any ideas?


I run the following (though installation corruptions have evidently occurred lately),
   kernel version  2.4.12  with all ext2 filesystems
   Debian version 3.0, though I haven't upgraded about 400 changed packages in the last 3 weeks
   libc6 version  2.2.4-7 
   dpkg   version 1.9.18
   gzip version 1.3.2-3
   
Thanks,
Jameson Burt