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On Sunday 06 April 2003 09:22 am, M. Fioretti wrote:
> I have also realized, however, that, partly due to my own fault, we
> have been mixing two quite unrelated issues here.
>
> 1) md5sum file.iso grants that what you downloaded is what
> was put on the official servers
> 2) linux mediacheck grants that what is on a CD is
> installable
Linux mediacheck actually verifies the md5sum. The anaconda build process
gets the md5sum and embeds it in the filesystem image (which changes the
md5sum).
The mediacheck feature extracts and verifies the embedded md5sum.
Various combinations of CD readers, writers, media, burning options etc.
will cause both to fail, as previous posts have mentioned.
> Only doing *both* steps by yourself grants (well, almost) that you will
> be able to install the official SW released by ACME, Inc.
> Unfortunately, step 1 is forbidden to guys without broadband, and step
> 2 alone doesn't prove zit as far as trusting the CD is concerned.
>
> "Mr CD, are you a trustworthy guy, or some nasty trojan?"
> .....it makes noises for a while, then says:
> "Gee, you can trust me because *I* say so, go put me aside
> your data"
>
> As far as I'm concerned (getting CDs for a home PC from somebody who I
> know keeps his PC reasonably safe) it's OK, but should we conclude
> that there is really no way to take a generic (*) CD and say "yes, this
> was made with the official {Red Hat|whatever} iso images"?
> Should we ask to Red Hat, or somebody else, to provide such a package?
Of course, there is nothing that prevents rebuilding the disks using the
anaconda tools, and embedding a new md5sum, which will pass the
mediacheck. However, in that case, the md5sums of the disk image won't
match Red Hat's.
Of course, if you are unable to verify the md5's, that isn't helpful.
In the for what it's worth department, I had a burner (Acer) that produced
disks where I was unable to read the md5sum using any combination of
options. It always wrote run out sectors to the disk. Using readcd or dd
and calculating the correct size, I could get them.
I replaced the burner with a a Plex writter, and haven't had a problem
since. I can get the md5sum with 'md5sum /dev/hdc'. With the older
burner, this always resulted in IO errors.
- --
- -Michael
pgp key: http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.{2,3}|8.0 in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/
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