[SATLUG] 2GB file size limit. EXT3 or SMB?

[masterr at gmail.com]

I have an interesting problem. I am backing up a computers hard drive that 
has about 5 GB of data on it with Ubuntu Live by using the dd command 
outputing to a SMB share (don't have NFS installed) on to another computer 
using the EXT3 filesystem with 60GB of free space. `dd if=/dev/hda 
of=smb/backup/henry-8-13-05.img`. This works fine and dandy untill the 
resulting image of the drive reaches 2GB in size. Is this 2GB a limit of 
samba, of EXT3, dd, or something I am not seeing? Does anyone know?

dd gives me "File size limit exceeded"

I could get around this by passing it through split, `dd if=/dev/hda | split 
-b 2000m - smb/backup/henry-8-13-05.img`, but if I do this I don't know of a 
way to compare the MD5 sums of the drive to the image. Can md5sum compute 
the combined sum of a split file after it has been split? If so then there 
is a solution, but I have no clue how to do it.

Also, if it was possible, it would like to be able to gzip the file before 
splitting it and still be able to compute the md5 sum of the originating 
.img from the split gzipped drive image. I can do this with `dd if=/dev/hda 
| gzip -c | split -b 2000m - smb/backup/henry-8-13-05.img`, but again, I 
have no idea how to check the md5 sum of the originating image to compare to 
the drive.

It would be great to get the md5 sum after it has been split, but I suppose 
if there is no way to do it I can pop another bigger hard drive into the 
comp, make the image to it, then compare the md5 sum locally (assuming the 
2gb limit wasn't for ext3). But thats a pain.

Anyway, thanks
-Jonathan Hull

-- 
Jon/MasteR
masterr at gmail.com

i am a n00b