md5 checksum problems with gentoo software

[Parcival]

Recently I have repeatedly experienced the problem that

emerge <insert-program-name-here>

would terminate after the download with the error message that the md5 check failed. Usually I solve this problem by removing the downloaded archive and emerge the whole thing a couple days later again. However, right now I have several times tried for the last week to emerge OpenOffice 1.1.3 to put it on a friends box, but it keeps failing the check.

So here my questions:

[list=1]
Anyone out there experiencing the same problems?
Does this problem only concern my mirror (ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/gentoo/) or is it a general error in all portage packages all over the world?
I haven't been able to locate the md5 files in /usr/portage/distfiles nor on the server, so where do they actually reside? Could it be that the md5 mismatch got fixed and I still have the old md5 file sitting somewhere on my disk, thus automatically failing the test after redownloading the whole archive?
If the last question is true, how come it did work earlier when I just deleted the archive and emerged the whole package again? I think portage does the md5 check before untarring the archive, which really does make sense, but where does it get the md5 checksum file since it's not provided together with the archive in distfiles?
[/list=1]

Thanks for enlightening me. :)

[retsaw]

The md5 sums are stored in the /usr/portage/<catagory>/<program>/files/digest<program-version> file, so it'd be updated whenever you do an emerge sync. I'd say it is most likely a bad network connection, which keeps ruining your downloads or it is a bad mirror. Try using the default mirror, I haven't had a problem with leaving it at that, when I tried using mirrorselect to choose a mirror for me and the one it choose kept giving me connection problems and slow downloads, so I switched back to the default and haven't had problems since.

[Parcival]

Thanks for your information. :) I tried and downloaded OpenOffice from the default mirror by commenting the mirrorselect command in my make.conf, but except for having a slower download I didn't benefit any from this strategy, OO still terminates with an md5 sum error. :(

BTW, I also kept emerging sync, but that doesn't seem to help either - explains why I got it working in earlier cases, though.

[retsaw]

I just had a quick look at the OpenOffice ebuild and it downloads from the OpenOffice servers not the Gentoo servers so your Gentoo mirror should not have any effect on downloading OpenOffice, perhaps you could try downloading the source manually and putting it in /usr/portage/distfiles yourself. If it still gives a checksum error and you are sure the download was okay (there may have been changes to the source since the gentoo md5sum was created) you can rebuild the md5sum using the ebuild command, I'm not too sure of the correct syntax as I've only done this once for an ebuild I added manually.

[retsaw]

Have you had any luck with this yet?

I emerged it this weekend to see if I would get the same problems you're having and it went without a problem, so the gentoo md5sum is correct.