SUSE 9.2 DVD FTP download goes negative!

jc_firestorm · 02-23-2005, 11:20 PM

ok i know i'm a total n00b and all, but are FTP downloads supposed to go negative? ok i'm downloading 9.2 (from windows now) and i go to eat or something, when i come back its negative!(?)
what's going on here? did i do something wrong? is there a bittorrent i can download from?

JSpired · 02-23-2005, 11:22 PM

Sorry, but what do you mean by "goes negative?"

jc_firestorm · 02-24-2005, 10:50 PM

well um...the status/amount dowloaded goes negative...what does this mean?

KimVette · 02-24-2005, 11:09 PM

It CANNOT go to a negative amount downloaded. What program are you using to download the file?

J.W. · 02-25-2005, 01:45 AM

Agreed - you need to define exactly what you mean by "goes negative". If you are downloading files your byte count simply cannot go negative as KimVette explained. Can you give specific examples of the behavior you have observed? -- J.W.

jolphil · 02-25-2005, 07:49 AM

Wait,
A similar thing happened to me last night..Look in the "General" forum under "wierd download"..
My download suddenly changed from a increasing filesize to a filesize dropping..
jolphil

KimVette · 02-25-2005, 06:26 PM

Hmm now that I think about it
Some FTP clients with the resume feature will chop off a small chunk at the tail end of the file prior to resuming, resulting in a momentary bit minute reduction in file size. I haven't seen that in any recent clients though - this was back in the days of dialup. (downloading Linux via dialup was not fun, btw!)

mrbadboy · 02-25-2005, 11:10 PM

I have experienced this too; using Firefox 1.0.
The file size starts ticking back. The download total shown in the download manager actually shows a minus (-), and the total file size is shown as getting smaller.
I don't know how to explain this any clearer.

jolphil · 02-26-2005, 07:47 AM

Quote:

I have experienced this too; using Firefox 1.0.

I wonder if Firefox has anything to do with it as I never saw this Before..
jolphil

J.W. · 02-26-2005, 11:18 AM

Sorry if I still seem confused by this but I just don't think I've ever seen this behavior. Are you saying that if you start an FTP download, then do an "ls -l" on the file while the download is underway, that the size of the file is less than zero? Or that in the download manager the progress bar goes in reverse? I wish I could offer some helpful advice but the problem description just doesn't match anything I've witnessed before -- J.W.

KimVette · 02-26-2005, 04:00 PM

Last night I was curious so I started downloading Suse 9.2 using the gftp extension in Firefox - and sure enough, jc_firestorm is absolutely right. I was shocked to see that the download made it all the way up to 2.2GB out of 3.3GB, and then the file size dropped down to 2.1GB. I am on ReiserFS so there is definitely no filesystem limitation - and gftp and Azureus both download the file just fine.

I'm shocked - to see such a major, major bug in Firefox.

J.W. · 02-26-2005, 04:41 PM

Well after doing some more digging, I found this on Bugzilla. More info here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=228968

-- J.W.

Brosky · 02-27-2005, 03:24 PM

I got mine the same way via Windows and Mozilla. I let it go for two hours or more and when it was done I burned the image to a DVD and installed my new system. I have no idea when it went negative, but it definitely didn't start out that way. I checked back in on with nearly 2Gigs downladed and it was running backwards then, so I figured it was a plan that may work.

Mine came from the Chicago FTP site.

Paul

JohnBell · 02-28-2005, 07:57 AM

Sounds like an overflow in the file size counter to me!

2.147 GB = 0x8000 000 = 2,147,483,648 bytes

And for the non programmers in the audience, the most significant bit is the sign bit so
0x7FFF FFFF = 2,147,483,647
0x7FFF FFFF + 1 = 0x8000 000 = -2,147,483,648

John

KimVette · 02-28-2005, 10:15 AM

That's exactly what it is but now that I've seen the bug firsthand I'm not trusting Firefox for any large file downloads for which there is no MD5 checksum provided until that issue is resolved.