I have an unsophisticated backup routine on one of my servers that just tar and gz the /var/www/html directory and then an office server downloads it from a protected directory.

Unfortunately it stopped working a couple of weeks ago so I went to find out what the problem was. After much tweaking and testing followed by a couple of hours Googling, it turns out that it wasn’t an Apache problem but a Linux Kernel problem. Certain kernels won’t allow files larger than 2Gb to be downloaded through Apache.

Since I wasn’t about to start messing around with a kernel upgrade on a production server, I went for downloading the file by FTP instead. Ican’t remember where I found this out, but if it was your site, leave a comment and I’ll credit you (there was more info there than here).

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 11:41 am and is filed under Software, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.