How do you use md5sum?

From: Ohmster (notareal_at_emailaddress.com)
Date: 04/29/05 

Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 12:51:15 GMT

I just downloaded Fedora Core 3 and am a little bit uncertain about the
integrity of the iso files, I would like to check them before burning the
CDs and be sure that they are intact and are "official". I went to
linuxiso and found FC3:
http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=64

Great, here is what I need, four CDs. I copy the URL for each CD on a
single line to a text file, next line, next URL, and I get four lines in
a text file with four URLs to the iso images, I call it fc3.txt. I run
wget to fetch the files:

wget -i fc3.txt

wget is off and running, grabbing the four iso files. Well, apparently
linuxiso does not have it's stuff together too well, the downloads are
slow and spotty. I have to run wget more than once to finish this
fetching:

wget -c -i fc3.txt

image four is not even a valid link so I cannot get image four. I hack
though the redirect and find the FTP site where the file is and grab the
last iso. I cannot complete the download, it stop and I try again and
finally give up and get the rest of the image file from a different
source.
http://linux.rz.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/download/fedora-i386/core3-iso/

Now I don't feel good about this download, too spotty and intermittent,
so I use that last URL to grab all four iso image files in one swoop,
they come fast and they come complete.

How do I check that these are indeed "official" FC3 image files and are
the same as those offered by the linuxiso website? Running md5sum like
this:

[ohmster@ohmster FC3]$ md5sum FC3-i386-disc1.iso
db8c7254beeb4f6b891d1ed3f689b412 FC3-i386-disc1.iso
[ohmster@ohmster FC3]$

Gives me this huge number that I could check against the md5sum number on
the linuxiso website or ever on the alternate download site, but that
kind of checking leaves a lot of room for human error. Isn't there a way
to make md5sum check the files itself against the md5sum files on the
linuxiso website and could I check these alternate files against the
linuxiso website to see if they are the same? How would I do this? I
cannot quite figure out md5sum and how it works. Thanks. 

-- 
~Ohmster
ohmster at newsguy dot com

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