Today i received a email from Red Hat , telling me that there was a errata alert ,so i quiet happily started the up2date process.
About 3-4 minutes into the download i receive a message saying,
" The package does not have a valid GPG signature . It has been tampered with or is corrupted continue ? "

Now do i continue and not know for sure that , this package is not going to cause havoc on my box ?

Why would RH send me a email telling me to download such n such package , when it could be corrupt ?

Doesn't RH check these things before releasing packages to the public ?

As I'm new to the linux world . if someone could explain why this happens and if its safe to continue downloading , i might gain a better understanding on how these things work .

Thanks in advance.

Regards

AXO

Try rerunning up2date/download it again? I seriously doubt anybody has compromised the Redhat servers, more likely it's a corrupted download

Thanks for the reply mhearn, ive tried it a fews times now and still no luck , same message .
Could the problem be caused by a bad phone line connection ,i'm using dial up ? .


Regards


AXO

A bad phone line could do it, try saving the download someplace where it wont't be overwritten by the next one and compare the downloads to see if they are the same (RH puts them in /var/spool/up2date by default on my machine). If you get consistently bad downloads, you could also download the rpm from a mirror and then use up2date with the -k<paths to package> option with up2date. The mirrors often provide better download speeds (even on dialup) and relieve lots of load on the RH servers. (Not that I should care anymore now that up2date is considered a "demo service" to those not paying a monthly fee).

You could download apt-get (RPM ) from freshrpms.net, that's what I use and you don't have to pay any monthly fees.

Install apt-get and run as root in console:

apt-get update
(do this twice, as there is a reported bug in the software)

when you've done that, run:

apt-get upgrade

and that will upgrade your entire system.

You'll learn to love apt-get (as resolves dependencies), it also installs other packages as well (check out the packages tab on the website)

apt-get install packagename

I hope this helps

don't forget the all important apt-get install synaptic

I love this app!

Yeah your problem with up2date is that the redhat servers are bogged down at the moment. This causes packages to corrupt while downloading. You can either wait until the smoke clears on there servers or apt-get for rpm as ven0m suggested.

Download corruption is not related to Red Hat Network being busy. It happens to some users also during other times. Access to Red Hat Network is prioritized. A demo user would be rejected if RHN is too busy serving paying customers.

Check out http://www.fedora.us for Yum or apt4rpm as an alternative update and packaging tool.

The way to remove the bad download is to delete the file in /var/spool/up2date and then rerun up2date. Or you download the updates from an FTP/HTTP mirror of updates.redhat.com and put them into /var/spool/up2date where up2date will pick them up.

Thanks to everyone who replied ,i'm now using apt-get .

Regards

AXO

p.s Is RH starting to sound like another OS i know of , maybe those debian woody cd's will come in handy after all .

Yes it does happen to some users when the server is not busy but when the servers are bogged down it certainly makes the chances of getting a corrupted download much higher.

That comparison is beyond my comprehension. What has changed? If you'd like to, you can still get the distribution and all its updates for free. Even "free" as in "free beer". That's unusual for a NASDAQ-listed company, isn't it? As long before, updates are still available on many FTP/HTTP servers world-wide. Nobody forces you to use Red Hat Network and its up2date tool. Nobody forces you to use Red Hat Linux either.

Pick and support the distribution/distributor you like best.