I am trying to build a debian machine that will be an FTP server so that I can use the g4u project from freshmeat.net, to backup and restore some computers I manage. However the problem is that g4u does not split the files and the FTP servers I have tried (proftpd, openbsd ftpd, and wu-ftpd) all have a file limit of 2gig for uploaded files.

At first I thought it was a file system limit but ulimit -a suggests that my max file size is unlimited. I even mke2fs'd the drive I am using with -T largefile4

Any help is appreciated..

Can you make files >4GB to your filesystem?

Easy way to test:
(that should make a file which has size of 5GB, but which uses only 10MB of diskspace.)

I will have to wait till monday to try that

it took me a week (flu) to get back to work but I did as you suggested.
I can create a file larger than 2gig using dd

However I can not create a file larger than that using an FTP server.

back to square one

I can't help you specifically on the ftp thing, but I back up several servers with tar and ssh
Here's a sample command that I would run on the server that I store the backup on:

ssh root@servertobackup tar czf - /home > /backup/servertobackup.tar.gz

I am needing to deploy XP on about 17 computers and am looking for a solution that will let me exercise the old grey matter a little bit. Normally I would put a slave drive in the machine, run PowerQuest Drive Image , make the copy and tote that around to each other machine, open it up and reverse the process.

I want to get away from that since I am, very soon, going to have a few more computers to deal with and want to be able to rapidly deploy these similar to imagecast. That is my goal.

Norton Ghost does drive images over the network. It takes longer to copy the image, but you don't have to mess with hardware.

That's what I was able to get done (well I used powerquest drive image)
Still was able to keep linux involved in the process by using a samba server as my file server
so am pretty happy about that.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.