On Sun, 23 Jul 2006, 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.
An md5sum has what, 32 hex digits? That's 128 bits, so there can only be
2^32 (about 4.3 billion) different md5sums. So the odds of two different
files having the same md5sum is 1/(2^32).
> 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.
Well, a small lottery. ISTR the Florida Lotto (pick 6 balls out of 40) is
13 billion or so combinations.
> 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.
Try the "-pad" option to cdrecord (or equivalent). You can check the ISO
before you burn it with isoinfo, to save time and a coaster.
> 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,.
Bad cached copy?
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