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

[Walt DuBose]

I know that you can't generally FTP a file larger than 2GB.

I sometimes zip up files and then do a split on them, ftp the smaller files and 
then re-assemble them and the unzip them.

Walt

masterr at gmail.com wrote:
> 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
>