I use "rsync" to mirror most of i386 Debian Linux. This has worked well for a year until the last few days. I tried to correct some oddly working packages that I had recently upgraded, but apt-get noticed that the locally downloaded Packages.gz files were corrupted, which I affirm by hand, gunzip: Packages.gz: invalid compressed data--format violated
Checking the source of the Packages.gz files, I used a command line rsync for one file, rsync -vt rsync://ftp1.sourceforge.net/debian/dists/woody/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz . This downloaded Packages.gz that "gunzip" could unzip. For example, dists/testing/non-free/binary-i386/Packages.gz had length 64,902 However, before my single file rsync, my nightly batched-rsync Packages.gz size was 88,035. Restarting the batched-rsync, the new Packages.gz became 81,726 which is still not correct. However, if I remove Packages.gz from my archives, then a batched-rsync downloads Packages.gz correctly with 64,902 bytes. Of course, I don't know how long I have had this underlying problem. I first noticed it this week. Could this be a problem with "rsync" or were there kernel problems so my filesystem is going bad, or ...? Any ideas? I run the following (though installation corruptions have evidently occurred lately), kernel version 2.4.12 with all ext2 filesystems Debian version 3.0, though I haven't upgraded about 400 changed packages in the last 3 weeks libc6 version 2.2.4-7 dpkg version 1.9.18 gzip version 1.3.2-3 Thanks, Jameson Burt
