Note that ftp.funet.fi has a caching ftp-server, and one thing it caches
is directory lookups (in a special ".FTP_LS_DATA" file so that it doesn't
need to look up all the inode information etc).
However, it's not implemented very well, and as a result the directory
cache gets out of sync with the real information when I upload things to
the site. I _used_ to be able to fix that with "dir -XYZ", but it seems
that that doesn't update the cache any more, so now the directory cache
only gets updated when the automatic update scripts run.
You can just "get" the file anyway, and you should get the correct file
unless you happened to ftp in when my uploads were still in progress (but
that's pretty unlikely: there's a reasonably fast network between the
university and the ftp.funet.fi file, so my uploads seldom take more than
a half a minute or something like that).
If you are still nervous, you can always try out ftp.cs.helsinki.fi, which
doesn't do that kind of caching, and actually gets the kernels about 2
minutes before ftp.funet.fi does ;-). However, that site _should_ be
considered a secondary site because it's a lot smaller than ftp.funet.fi
(ftp.funet.fi is a large site with local RAID disks, a powerful alpha CPU
etc, while ftp.cs.helsinki.fi is just a cluster of three normal pentiums
running Linux that get the files over NFS over normal ethernet).
Linus