[Spacewalk-list] Installed packages-contents checksums question

[Jonathan Hoser]

Hi all,

this is might be only on the sidelines be related to spacewalk, but I
thought I'd try anyhow:

I'm hunting down a bug which currently causes to instant-crash (for
users, not root!) on boxes that I just kickstarted from Spacewalk based
on the very latest Fedora16 x64 repos.

Thinking about some package issue with Thunderbird I completely replaced
the relevant binaries /usr/lib64/thunderbird/* with those from a (also
SW-kickstarted) F16 x64 system where TB works.
To no avail.

Then I went looking at the system-libs in /lib64 and started to
comparing, where I came across the following:

Yesterday I kickstarted 5 F16 boxes, and I would have expected the
contents of /lib64 to be bit-identical.
But a checksumming (md5, sha, sha256 - all tested to be sure) differed
for *each* file in /lib64 on *each* host.
Do you see that too? Is this to be expected?
If so - why?
If not - ???

If the answer is obvious, please say so, but a few hours of googling
around haven't turned up anything useful....

The underlying repos  might have seen ~3 repo-syncs - but only on
F16-updates repo, and surely not the base-repo (synced once a day).

Sadly enough I don't have manually - from DVD - installed boxes around
any more to check the behaviour on those;

Example:
[me at host ~]$ grep -r "libz.so" *_lib64.md5
217-111.DOMAIN.de_lib64.md5:e088a34f45b22c64ccf78f2d1b6b1f50
/lib64/libz.so.1.2.5
217-168.DOMAIN.de_lib64.md5:b3e0068f7e74895c2100ed36e84e6799
/lib64/libz.so.1.2.5
218-158.DOMAIN.de_lib64.md5:8584386d2d08bc03ce00714d173c9209
/lib64/libz.so.1.2.5
218-072.DOMAIN.de_lib64.md5:bdc5b2f1cc1c7522d805d42822c64f25
/lib64/libz.so.1.2.5
217-225.DOMAIN.de_lib64.md5:02a15008f9d40212d0743bcf738f58d5
/lib64/libz.so.1.2.5
217-229.DOMAIN.de_lib64.md5:b3e0068f7e74895c2100ed36e84e6799
/lib64/libz.so.1.2.5
037-113.DOMAIN.de_lib64.md5:aabc27aafa6a65b0eaf33ded41ca0101
/lib64/libz.so.1.2.5

Script to test is stupid easy, relies on nfs drive to collect the data.
hosts="hosta hostb hostc"
for i in $hosts; do echo "Host: ${i}"; ssh ${i} 'md5sum /lib64/* >
/path/to/nfs/${HOSTNAME}_lib64.md5'; done

I'm really looking forward to answers -
and if it's only to verify I'm not going completely nuts...

Best
-Jonathan

--
Jonathan Hoser, M.Sc.
Institute of Bioinformatics and System Biology




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