I've had wget downloading disk 4 in the 5 disc set for the last day or so on my Linux-based gateway (mainly so my parents wouldn't find out > and I've struck somewhat of a problem (or at least I think it is): a couple of FTP clients (the one in my browser and the one invoked by the Linux ftp command) report the size of the iso to be 626262016 bytes but wget has only downloaded 398547520 bytes. Which is the correct size and how would I go about getting the rest of it if it's wrong? Being on dialup I really don't want to have to start the download over again...

edit: Forgot to mention that I tried mounting it and that seemed to work OK but I'm not sure if thats a good indicator of its integrity or not...

I believe the actual size is the larger of the two. The good news is that you might not have to start from the beginning, just try a different mirror site and ftp generally will allow you to resume from where it left off.

I would have thought so to but wget seemed convinced it was only 400-odd. Still, I just told it to resume from where it left off and depsite a jacked representation of how much has been downloaded (it currently say 518%) it seems to be proceeding well. What I'm worried about though is that it may have just started appending the beginning of the iso to the end making the file a huge mess but we shall see.

You didn't get a chance to make a copy of what you downloaded so far?

No, I didn't. It finished downloading though and while the filesize matches what the FTP clients say exactly, the MD5SUM looks wildly different to what was in both the FTP directory I downloaded it from and RHs own FTP site. So, on one hand, I'm looking down the barrel of a dud iso but on the other, I've never really used MD5SUMs before so I'm debating whether I should start now...

Well, RH8 does let you verify your CDs at the very beginning of the installation. So, all you have to do is just run a CD check on all of them. Besides, you only need the first 3 to get the installation done, so you should be fine.