# Does Samba Networking have a file size limit?

## Belboz

I have a couple samba shares set up on my Gentoo box.  I tried moving some large mpeg captures I made on one of my Windows boxes onto the Gentoo box.

The drives I have the samba shares set to save to are FAT32 since I dual boot the Gentoo system and want to be able to access them from Windows and Linux.

Anyway..  I was moving one mpeg over and the transfer stopped near the end.  The Windows box said "Cannot Copy: Invalid File Handle).  Tried it another time.  Same thing.  It seemed to stop in the same spot both times.  So I tried another mpeg file and it copied fine.  

So I tried a third one and it failed.  I looked at the original files on the Windows box and noticed the two that failed were about  2.2GB each.  The one that copied was 1.9GB.  

So I did some google searching and noticed people talking about a 2GB limitiation with older Samba versions and older kernels.  Also a 2GB limitation on ext2 partitions.  Everybody seemed to indicate this should not be an issue on any recent distros (and the messages were about a year old).

I know FAT32 supposedly has a 4GB file limitation.  Plus I know it isn't the problem since I can boot Windows on that machine and copy the files to that drive no problem.

The errors I see in the samba log are as follows.

[2002/07/02 16:48:03, 3] smbd/process.c:switch_message(684)

  switch message SMBwriteX (pid 5292)

[2002/07/02 16:48:03, 0] smbd/fileio.c:seek_file(43)

  seek_file: (videos/S20020621_095758.mpg) sys_lseek failed. Error was Invalid argument

[2002/07/02 16:48:03, 3] smbd/error.c:error_packet(91)

  error string = Invalid argument

[2002/07/02 16:48:03, 3] smbd/error.c:error_packet(110)

  error packet at smbd/reply.c(2836) cmd=47 (SMBwriteX) NT_STATUS_INVALID_HANDLE

Anybody have any thoughts?

----------

## pjp

With a recent version of Solaris, we had to use an fstab setting for lare file support.  

I forget what it was, but you might look in that direction.  I don't recall if samba was 

the reason we used the setting though.

----------

## Belboz

I have an update.

The problem seems to be between Samba and the FAT32 partition.  I setup a Samba share to one of my Linux Partitions (ext3) and was able to transfer the 2GB+ files to it no problem and access them fine.

No matter what I do if I transfer with Samba to the FAT32 drive it is a problem on 2GB+ files.  Samba to an ext3 partition is fine though.

And like I mentioned before I can boot the machine into Windows instead of Linux and move files from the other computer through a Windows Share to the FAT32 drive no problem.

So I am just using my ext3 partitions for now.

----------

## mglauche

if you use fat32 under linux the filesize will be very likely to be 2 gb  :Smile:  increasing the filesize (to 64 bit ..) was quite an effort, and i don't think they'll make an exeption for fat32 under linux  :Wink: 

----------

