2 Gigabyte Limit?

For some reason I cannot send files more than 2 gigabytes in size over a mounted smb share whether I copy in the console or through the KDE file browser. Is this a protocol limit or a Linux implementation limit?

It is a protocol limit which is because of the windows protocol. After all it is no good idea to use files bigger than 2 GB under windows, exactly for that reason

Well I am actually trying to transfer a 4 gig file from one linux box to a linux server. I tried rz/sz but apparently zmodem over tcp suffers from the same limitation. My next thought would be ftp but that would mean I have to implement something that I really don't want to put on the server, and I'm afraid I'll run into the same limitation there. Does anyone have any other suggestions short of attaching a serial cable and waiting for the next 5 years for the transfer to finish?

I suppose I could split the file in two with dd and then put it back together with the same tool on the other side, but this is not very practical. There must be a better way!

You can try to rsync the files over. If you want to try that I'll post how I do it when I get home. I actually backed up my storage hard drive of 175GB to another 175GB drive.

login with ssh and use scp

This is just one huge file though. You may have backed up 175 gigabytes of files, but were any individual files in that backup in excess of 2 gigabytes? Will rsync handle a file over 2GB?

Originally posted by storm@May 26 2004, 02:39
login with ssh and use scp

I'll give that a try. This looks a lot like sz/rz though, but I guess it's a totally different project. Hopefully this doesn't have a 2GB limit as well!

Awesome! scp did the trick. Thanks.

I had created some bootable CD's with a small linux environment, dd, gzip, smb, ftp, and nfs networking utilities. I wrote a bunch of scripts where when you booted from the CD, you could restore images from any of the above mentioned servers, or push images up. I kept running into that 2GB barrier, however using gzip usually kept the images (this was used mostly for fresh installs) below 2GB compressed. This was amazingly fast, and I'll have to see if I can dig up the CD and incorporate scp into this to eliminate the 2GB barrier.

Right now I was trying to push my DVD image of SuSE 9.1 to a small PC I have which does not have a DVD and I'm too lazy to copy the contents of all 6 CDs.

Thanks again!

Np and thank you for giving some feedback