Weird Scenes inside the Tarball, Midnight Commander woes | Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

I was transferring an apt repository to a remote site using the tarbal I created locally. When the first machines tried to do an apt-get update from that repository they failed to getthe package list.

1. Jun 24 11:01:28 10.99.2.253 root: Failed to fetch <a href="http://10.99.0.1/repo/ntc/i386/base/pkglist.CentOsDistro" title="http://10.99.0.1/repo/ntc/i386/base/pkglist.CentOsDistro">http://10.99.0.1/repo/ntc/i386/base/pkglist.CentOsDistro</a>  404 Not Found
2. Jun 24 11:09:29 10.99.2.253 root: Err <a href="http://10.99.0.1" title="http://10.99.0.1">http://10.99.0.1</a> i386/CentOsDistro pkglist

However at first sight the appropriate files were in place

1. base.old]# ls -al
2. total 700
3. drwxr-xr-x   2 root root   4096 Jun 23 10:09 .
4. drwxr-xr-x  11 root root   4096 Jun 24 13:01 ..
5. -rw-r--r--   1 root root 372662 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsBase
6. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  59804 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsBase.bz2
7. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  54788 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsBaseUpdates
8. -rw-r--r--   1 root root   9908 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsBaseUpdates.bz2
9. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  35685 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsCustom
10. -rw-r--r--   1 root root   8231 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsCustom.bz
11. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  34663 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsDistro
12. -rw-r--r--   1 root root   8901 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsDistro.bz
13. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  23432 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsExtrapackages
14. -rw-r--r--   1 root root   5931 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.CentOsExtrapackages.bz2
15. -rw-r--r--   1 root root  11144 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.Externals
16. -rw-r--r--   1 root root   3607 Jun 23 10:07 pkglist.Externals.bz2
17. -rw-r--r--   1 root root   1650 Jun 23 10:09 release
18. -rw-r--r--   1 root root    129 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsBase
19. -rw-r--r--   1 root root    136 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsBaseUpdates
20. -rw-r--r--   1 root root    131 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsCustom
21. -rw-r--r--   1 root root    131 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsDistro
22. -rw-r--r--   1 root root    138 Jun 23 10:07 release.CentOsExtrapackages
23. -rw-r--r--   1 root root    128 Jun 23 10:07 release.Externals

Now if you take a closer look you’ll notice 2 out of 6 .bz2 files ending with .bz rather than .bz2
On the server where I created the tarbal they had the correct .bz2 extension

When digging into the remote tarbal with mc (MidNight Commander) however the .bz extention was shown again.

Somehow while copying the directories out of the tarbal using mc the filenames got changed, as upon doing a regular untar from the command line the files once again had the correct .bz2 extention.

Im not using mc again to get selected data out of a tarbal, Ill stick to the old commandline for untarring :)

Weird stuff …