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Re: MD5 sums



On Tue, Oct 19, 1999 at 12:38:51PM -0500, Adam Heath wrote:
> apt checks the md5sum WHILE it is downloading.  This is called streaming.  It
> is always enabled, and can't be turned off.
OK.  Here is the problem I had.  Due to BIOS misconfiguration (I guess) all
files which sizes were larger than, let's say, N Kbytes, got corrupted after
copying to the hard drive:

$ cp a-big-enough-file /mnt
$ md5sum {,/mnt/}a-big-enough-file
an md5 sum  a-bin-enough-file
same   sum  /mnt/a-big-enough-file
$ umount /mnt ; mount /mnt # it is in /etc/fstab
$ md5sum {,/mnt/}a-big-enough-file
an md5 sum  a-bin-enough-file
difrnt sum  /mnt/a-big-enough-file

Unfortunately, I did not notice it timely, and the files I downloaded during
`apt-get install' got corrupted.  Then apt-get started dpkg, who reported an
invalid file (actually, error from tar), and I got a nice non-working system.  :)

So, let me rephrase my question.  Is it possible to ask apt-get to check md5
sums for the files that are already downloaded and are about to be installed?
If no, is it possible to add such a feature to apt-get?  (I do not think a lot
of people are going to use it, but I, for sure, am going to turn it on :)
Or will this feature be useless (read, there are other ways for checking the
downloaded files is not corrupted, if so, I did not find any obvious ones)?

Streaming is good when you are sure about the media where you put the
downloaded files.  What to do if you are not?

--
Mike


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