[ale] md5sum weirdness on firefox

[Jeff Lightner]

md5sum and Firefox in title - how is either of these a global issue with
rpm?

 

So far as I know checking the sum of a file leaves it unchanged.
Transferring (downloading a file) can change it easily if you an ascii
transfer of a binary file.

 

Personally I find apt rather unwieldy to use and with the advent of yum
the dependency issues that were the bane of rpm users have mostly gone
away.

 

________________________________

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
To: ale at ale.org
Michael B. Trausch
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 8:13 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] md5sum weirdness on firefox

 

On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 00:26 -0800, Joe Bayes wrote:



It's supposed to give output even on success, right? Not that rpm has
been exactly bulletproof lately. The standard fix (removing the
__db files and --rebuilddb) didn't fix the problem. Neither did
reinstalling rpm.


You know, once upon a time I heard someone liken RPM to something that
would have come from Redmond.

And, I said "Nah, they'll fix it in a few years or less, and that's not
what Redmond would do."  And I seem to have been proven wrong on that.
Red Hat is a good company, but I think it is time that they retire RPM
and switch over to APT.  Not only would they instantly get rid of the
problems of RPM which don't seem to have been improved in almost ten
years, but they would have something that they could improve, starting
from something that is known to be working.  :-)




Then, I find out that my md5sum binary is horfed:

spoo:~$ md5sum /usr/bin/md5sum
660081e855c8e3b562864c27946b9e69 /usr/bin/md5sum
spoo:~$ rpm -q coreutils
coreutils-5.97-12.3.fc6
spoo:~$ 

But I reinstalled coreutils, and now I am getting the same checksum as
you are on /usr/bin/md5sum. Yay...one problem down. But I'm still
getting the same bad firefox checksum:

spoo:~/ff$ /usr/bin/md5sum /usr/bin/md5sum 
d4cbe115e872499ddd8dfebfe5bf37cb /usr/bin/md5sum
spoo:~/ff$ /usr/bin/md5sum firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm 
c1a703baffce31371ce91d2b830220d7 firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm

I'm starting to wonder if maybe somebody rooted me. Either that, or
SELinux is breaking things in some horribly silent and opaque way YET
AGAIN. 


You might want to have a nightly cron job run that builds a database of
all the files, and then checks their MD5 hash against a known good one,
chucking out an e-mail for ones that are changed and not ELF objects, or
scripts outside of /home/*.  That way, you'll know the instant that a
file changes, and you'll also know (in theory) what changes are okay,
and what ones are not.  In that regard, you can create a "whitelist" of
files that you don't need to monitor (databases, etc.) and that way
anything something is changed that is not on that whitelist, you will
know about.

    -- Mike


--

Michael B. Trausch 

fd0man at gmail.com

Phone: (404) 592-5746 

Jabber IM: 

fd0man at gmail.com
fd0man at livejournal.com 

Demand Freedom!  Use open and free protocols, standards, and software! 

 

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