Ollama Verified Corrupt Model Files as Valid, Wasting Two Days of Debugging
A developer running AI agent frameworks in a hardened VM spent two days troubleshooting recurring system hangs and a broken model, tracing errors through Python frameworks and HTTP libraries before finding the real cause. Ollama, a local model-serving tool, was falsely reporting successful installations of model files that were actually filled with null bytes due to interrupted writes. The tool's content-addressed storage system names each file after its own SHA256 hash, but Ollama skips re-hashing files that already exist at the expected path, silently trusting corrupt data. A single manual sha256sum command immediately revealed the mismatch between a file's name and its actual contents — a check the tool claimed to perform but did not. The developer found two corrupted files out of thirteen in the store, and confirmed the flaw deliberately by zeroing a file and watching Ollama count it as valid on restart.
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