Red Hat Knowledgebase

Samba shares that are mounted using smbmount (which internally uses mount -t smbfs) uses the smbfs.o kernel module. This module does not support file sizes greater than 2 GB. So any manipulation done to a file greater than 2GB will fail with a 'file size limit exceeded' error.

In addition, the server that is being mounted with smbmount must be a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server, otherwise, this procedure may not work.

The 2.4.21-*EL* kernels can pass the lfs option in the smbfs kernel module.

The common misconception about smbfs.o is that it is a part of Samba package, but it is a filesystem module for the kernel to dialogue over CIFS/SMB protocol.

Example:

If you need to copy a file to Samba Share using smbclient then use the following syntax:

$smbclient //<machine_name>/<samba_share_name> <password> -U <username> -c 'put <file_name>'

To test this:

1. Generate a file of 2.1 gigabytes:

   # dd if=/dev/zero of=largefile bs=100M count=21
   

2. Mount the CIFS fs:

   # mount -t smbfs //dhcp-0-222/jmp /mnt/smbfs -o username=jmp,lfs
   

3. Copy it:

   # cp largefile /mnt/smbfs