Muppity: How to check the integrity of your SQLServer media installer

lunes, 27 de enero de 2020

How to check the integrity of your SQLServer media installer

Have you ever have an issue where you are pressed with limited time to deliver media took forever to be placed at target new server and everybody is expecting the release? not to mention you still need time to configure monitoring and best practices configurations settings to the new asset. Because of your precious time, it is a good practice to verify the media installer prior to do anything as it might be corrupted by many factors during download, transportation.. In order to do so, this is a quick tip of how to use the Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier utility.
Once the utility is download and installed, lets check usage: Here is how you can

Help description detail use

with this utility you can verify and select hash type as well as list entries from the database, as default md5 type is selected. Lets do some tests,

Example 1: testing media and getting hash value

For the example #1 (without parameters) only the media path, and it will return the MD5 hash wich you can search to identify match for your file.

Example 2: creating a new xml file with your hash info

By detailing the parameter -xml followed by path it creates a new xml if file doesn't exists.

checking the XML content we may see the MD5 content and name for the file entry.

Conclusion

This tool can be useful to verify the file integrity as it can be compromised, becoming corrupted. A file can become corrupted by a variety of ways: faulty storage media, errors in transmission, write errors during copying or moving. The Hash-based verification match ensures that a file has not been corrupted by comparing the file's hash value to a previously calculated value obtained on site when downloaded. If these values match, the file is presumed to be unmodified. Due to the nature of hash functions, hash collisions may result in false positives, however since there are 2 methods of hash values MD5, SHA1 you can do both to be sure.