Strange contents on some ftp mirrors

[Marcin Wisnicki]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:23:58 +0200, Dominic Fandrey wrote:

> On 28/07/2010 23:36, Marcin Wisnicki wrote:
>> 
>> What do you mean by master ? If you think about ftp-master then it's
>> password protected. AFAIK there is no publicly available ftp site that
>> is an authoritative source, ftp.freebsd.org is synced just like any
>> other mirror.
>> You can see in my initial post that it was even less up-to-date than
>> ftp.fr.freebsd.org.
> 
> Well, I never had a download of an INDEXED package fail from one of the
> unnumbered servers, so there ought to be something different, because
> the remaining mirrors normally only are able to provide ~20% of them.
> 

Well, ftp.fr.freebsd is not numbered and it just failed.
In the past I had problems with ftp.freebsd.org.
In fact there may be even problems with ftp-master. Not so long ago
uploaded package of openjdk6 was truncated on every mirror.
Though it's something that you really can't defend against :(

> Any way, in pkg_upgrade terms master is whichever server is chosen to
> provide the index. Everything else downloaded will be checked to be
> consistent with that one.
> 
> It's not about getting the latest packages, but about getting a
> consistent set.

Indeed, that's why you can't trust mirrors.
And since there is no other source to trust you must do as much sanity
checking as possible.