md5 checksum or gpg signature

Dear all

One of my colleagues gots the idea to have included into each netCDF file a

checksum or a signature to indicate if the file gots changed by some kind o
f 
damaging (a virus or some hardware failures).

The reason why we need such a information is the files gots larger and larg
er 
and you can't guarantee if a file which comes from a backup or from a file

copy is the original one.

We have had a very interesting hardware failure on a harddisk on one of our

systems which inhibits the copying of a netCDF file in that way that's only

one parameter of a file was not readable. It takes a long time to understan
d 
why this file on an other machine was readed right. 

If there will be automaticly included a kind of self diagnostic it is much

easier to find out why some data does not look as supposed. And you know 
immediatly that there is something wrong!

I think if there are ideas how to implent this feature it should be done. I
t 
is very important for all of us!


cheers
Reimar

-- 
Forschungszentrum Juelich
email: R.Bauer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.fz-juelich.de/icg/icg-i/
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