I needed a copy of fedora core 3 for a machine I’m building, so I broke out the handy bittorrent link and zinged it to my colocated server. That was nice – I got about 800k/sec sustained during the download. What was also nice is that the MD5 sums matched – good files to start with.
Then I downloaded them to our local fileserver (in case we need them again, plus I’ve managed to stuff my laptop full to the brim with data… again.) Problem: MD5sums no longer match. D’oh. (I’m not sure what causes them to barf, but interestingly, this happened last time I did basically the exact same scenario with fedora core 1!)
So, instead of downloading them again:
$ rsync -c --existing --stats -e ssh server:download/heidelberg-binary-i386/*.iso .
Let rsync figure out exactly what portions of the file are screwed up, and then let it correct them for you! The trick turned out to be the ‘-c’ flag, which forces it to do a checksum on the files. (Otherwise, since all the other metadata matches, it won’t bother diffing.)
It ended up taking about 5 minutes to correct both .iso’s – trivial, compared to the time it would have taken to download them again (possibly with more errors, meaning another download, etc.)