[ale] md5sum weirdness on firefox

[Joe Bayes]

Hi folks,

Since firefox-1.5.0.10 is out and working fine, this is a matter of
curiosity, not system stability. But if you have some spare time on
your hands maybe you can help me figure out this puzzle.

I'm running Fedora 6. I downloaded firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm from
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/6/i386/. 
When I tried to install it, yum complained about the md5sum of one
of the files. The Nice Folks At Redhat think it was a corrupted
download. 

I don't think the download was corrupted, and here's why: I downloaded
it several more times (using yum, firefox, wget, and curl), and each
time I got an identical, non-working file. I downloaded the file from
redhat directly to a third computer (a Solaris box that isn't
administered by me), then uploaded the non-working file from my
computer to the Solaris box, and compared the files: they were
identical.

However, on the Fedora box on which I'm trying to install firefox:
spoo:~/ff$ md5sum firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm 
c1a703baffce31371ce91d2b830220d7  firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm

On the Solaris box:
occs:/tmp/jbayes/thru_spoo$ md5 firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm 
MD5 (firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm) = 1284459a13f9898487f06ee925876b2c

On the computer belonging to the Nice Folks At Redhat:
[matej at hubmaier ~]\$ md5sum firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm 
1284459a13f9898487f06ee925876b2c  firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm

My question: Why do the checksums differ? If your answer is "because
the files differ", then how is it that the file transferred from
redhat to spoo to occs has the same checksum as the one on hubmaier at
redhat? 

Further details are available at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=228915 . If you
look at that, be aware that matej's installation using the --test
option will not cause the bug to manifest -- it complains about the
mismatch only when I attempt an install for real.

Joe

p.s. Would someone mind checking the following sha1sum to make sure it
matches? My current hypothesis is that my md5sum binary might be
messed up in some bizarre way.
spoo:~/ff$ sha1sum firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm 
87f92c482cb7fda31d6f2d1c21213751a9e814ea  firefox-1.5.0.9-3.fc6.i386.rpm

--
Joe Bayes -- jbayes at spoo.mminternet.com