[Gllug] Checking many files for integrity on a corrupted mirror

[Chris Bell]

Hello,
   I had a couple of boxes in fairly continuous use still running Debian
Etch, (now resident in the archives), while it is hoped that the current
Lenny will be replaced soon by Squeeze (testing). I decided that Lenny
should be fairly bug free by now, so do a system upgrade on one box (amd64).
   That appeared to go well, but the much used K3B CD/DVD burner software
started trying to burn at slightly less than 10% of the intended speed,
while CPU use dropped to about 92% idle and I ended up with a pile of
coasters. A quick check showed a load of bug reports dating from the
introduction of Lenny.
   No worry, I decided to continue with another update to Squeeze which has
a later version of K3B.
   That system upgrade deleted about 2/3 of the resident software and then
hung. Luckily I had backed up everything.
   Meanwhile I tried to do a regular security update on my i386 laptop which
has been running Squeeze for some time. I am used to it hanging after each
kernel upgrade, sorted by using an earlier version until the most recent
starts to work, but on this occasion it hung completely every time I tried
to start X. A complete re-install failed, with a complaint about a corrupted
file.
   I deleted the file from my local mirror, but it took several attempts to
complete an ftpsync because of random C&W ADSL restarts.
   I was still getting complaints about the same corrupted file, but now
both the i386 and amd64 versions. I was able to install Squeeze on both
boxes by using a different mirror directly over the internet, so I have
downloaded both the i386 and amd64 versions of the file from four different
Debian mirror sites plus the University of Kent mirrorservice.org site that
I had been using. Both files from Kent show the correct byte counts but
wrong checksums using cksum.
   I have reported the corruption to the University of Kent three times, but
no response so far, the cksums still appear to be incorrect on

/debian/pool/main/q/qt4-x11/libqtgui4_4.6.3-1+b1_amd64.deb
/debian/pool/main/q/qt4-x11/libqtgui4_4.6.3-1+b1_i386.deb

   I have only checked these two files, but I have a local RAID pair
containing a high proportion of the Debian website downloaded using ftpsync
from the mirrorservice.org site, and would now like to check the integrity
of all files. Will ftpsync, which uses rsync, do this if I use another
reference mirror?

   I have discovered that there is an additional problem related to the xorg
driver for the Intel video hardware on the laptop which causes it to hang as
soon as I try to start x, so it is now running Debian Lenny (stable).
   There was also another problem affecting the amd64 box because /boot was
on a separate RAID1 pair, and an attempted upgrade to grub2 failed because
it requires /boot to be in the / partition, not separate.


-- 
Chris Bell www.chrisbell.org.uk (was www.overview.demon.co.uk)
Microsoft sells you Windows ... Linux gives you the whole house.

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