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Buddy Cluster
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Verifying a download

What this gets you

Confidence that the installer image or tarball you downloaded is exactly the file it’s supposed to be, before you flash it to a card or run it on a machine — not corrupted in transit, not tampered with.

Before you start

  • You’ve downloaded the image or tarball itself.
  • You’ve also downloaded its matching SHA256SUMS file, into the same folder as the download.

The steps

  1. Open a terminal in the folder holding both files, and run:

    Terminal window
    sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

    This is the one case where a terminal command is genuinely necessary — checking a file’s integrity isn’t something the panel can do for you before the software is even installed.

How you know it worked

The command prints the downloaded file’s name followed by OK. If it instead prints FAILED, the file doesn’t match what was published — don’t use it. Delete it and download it again.