Issues with large files on nfs-mounted filesystems?

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jun 03), Jim Hatfield said:
> I've made a large .mpg file on a Linux machine (because some
> tools, such as mplex, are newer than available in FreeBSD ports).
> 
> Here's a directory listing:
> 
> >-rw-r--r--  1 jim users 4388444160 Jun  2 23:15 movie.mpg
> 
> I want to burn it to DVD but the burner is on a BSD box, so 
> I nfs-mount the /home partition. However when I look at the
> same file from FreeBSD 5.1 I get:
> 
> >-rw-r--r--  1 jim  100  93476864 Jun  3 00:15 movie.mpg
> 
> (yes I know there is a time zone issue. I haven't worked 
> out how to set it on Gentoo yet).
> 
> The difference between the sizes is 4294967296, ie 2^32.
> 
> Anyone know if this is an issue with the NFS implementations
> or whether the NFS protocols have a 32-bit size limit?

NFSv2 can only do 32-bit file sizes.  Make sure you're using NFSv3
mounts (which should be the default).
 
> Even copying the file from one machine to the other
> is proving a challenge! Trying to push from Gentoo to FreeBSD
> gets:
> 
> >ftp> put movie.mpg
> >local: movie.mpg remote: movie.mpg
> >local: movie.mpg: File too large
> 
> and trying to pull from the FreeBSD box gets:
> 
> >ftp> get movie.mpg
> >local: movie.mpg remote: movie.mpg
> >227 Entering Passive Mode (192,168,100,2,128,64)
> >550 movie.mpg: File too large.

Sounds like Gentoo's ftp client and server daemons weren't compiled
with large file support.  Linux requires that you compile with
-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE, or else you can't access
files over 2GB.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com