G-day

Newbie here.

We are currently running Redhat 5.4 64Bit (Build 2.6.18-164.e15) however having issues with tar files that are greater than 2TB in size.

We have been told that upgrading the kernel to support the ext4 file system (supported in version 5.5?) and mounting the current 10TB nas share as an ext 4 file system may solve our over 2TB file size issues. (please correct me if I am wrong)

• Are their limitations within the ext3 file system that cause issues to files greater than 2TB and if this is the case
• Do we have to update the kernel (complete rebuild), or can we load a package on the redhat box to support the ext 4 file system
• Where do we get the upgrade/package. I have logged onto the redhat site and can not find kernel updates but can find the full installation packages.
• We are not connected directly to the internet and do not have access to the update repository

Thanks in advance for your assistance in this matter.

Cheers

Rog_ski

To get you started:

"Currently, Ext3 support 16 TB of maximum file system size and 2 TB of maximum file size. Ext4 adds 48-bit block addressing, so it will have 1 EB of maximum file system size and 16 TB of maximum file size." - Source

Thanks Valen tino

This does answer one question for us and "could" be the cause of the error when we attempt to extract a 2.2TB tar file

# tar -xf filname.tar.gz

Gzip: Stdin: Unexpected end of file
Tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
Tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
Tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Will Redhat 5.5 give us access to ext4 and will I have to do the full upgrade or can I load a patch - package to get that functionality

Thanks again

Well, according to the release notes of RHEL 5.5, ext4 is a Technology Preview. "Technology Preview features are currently not supported under Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription services, may not be functionally complete, and are generally not suitable for production use. However, these features are included as a customer convenience and to provide the feature with wider exposure." Source.

Also this link has all the features of RHEL 5.5 listed.

Going by this, it is not recommended to implement ext4 in a production area. Instead you could try this in a sandbox server to see if ext4 resolves your issue. If it does then you may want to consider moving to RHEL 6 which is due to release shortly and includes ext4 by default. Source.

Thanks, while I appreciate the detail in your response I am not sure you completely answered my questions from the posts 1 or 2.

We are looking for a fix of extracting that 2.2 TB tarfile and while we will look into RHEL 6 for the future it doesn't fix our our current issue.

Question: Are we able to mount an ext4 file system (single share) on our current RHEL 4 box or do we need to upgrade the whole box to RHEL 5.

Question: Where do i get the source files

Up until yesterday I had been able to find all my answers through Google but had hit a dead end so thought I could find a quick answer here.

Regards

EXT4 is supported on RHEL 5.3 (I think) and above. I would recommend going to 5.5. In short you will have to upgrade to RHEL 5.

You will have to install e4fsprogs to create EXT4 file systems. This rpm is in the RHEL media itself. If you don't have the DVD/CDs then you can download it from RHN since yum is not an option for you.

Again, you are trying to do something that Red Hat doesn't support in a production environment. I highly recommend that you do this in your test area first to validate the integrity of your data.

1 members found this post helpful.

Regardless the RHEL stuff, ext4 is not available for your kernel at all. It's just too old.

Secondly, your current fs (ext3) CAN NEVER hold a file that's bigger than 2TB, this means that if you tried to store a bigger file then it's been truncated. Extracting file from the 2TB archive IS NOT the problem (as long as the files inside are not bigger than 2TB themselves). The problem is that maybe your tar file is not correct because it couldn't be stored in first place.

Third, if you don't want to bother just use XFS, it can host files up to 8 Exabytes. I wouldn't use it if you don't have a good UPS, though.

1 members found this post helpful.

Now were cooking with gas. Thank you for your help guys

I would like to see if the file issue we are experiencing is related to a corrupt tar file or to the restrictive ext3 file system.

We are in the process of installing 5 in our lab and give it a run through.

Cheers