gzip / compression problems

Hi,

We have a White Box EL 3.0 box that we're using as a samba file server
and a CVS server.

We were using the

tar -cvz <directory> | ssh backup_user@backup_server '(cat >
backup.tgz)'

method to backup certain shares overnight, but upon trying to recover
some files we discovered that the backup.tgz would neither tar -xvzf,
nor gunzip (gzip -d). At first we thought this might be corruption
during the ssh transfer of data, but eventually we narrowed it down to
compression problems on the file server.

In short when I gzip a file it will complete without error. Even with
the -v option it just states the compression rate.

When I gzip -d or gunzip the .gz file I get the following output:

# ls -lh tech.tar
-rw------- 1 root root 3.9G Feb 27 10:44 tech.tar
# ls -l tech.tar
-rw------- 1 root root 4179896320 Feb 27 10:44 tech.tar

(The tar checks out fine, btw)

# gzip -v tech.tar
tech.tar: 26.6% -- replaced with tech.tar.gz

# ls -l tech.tar.gz
-rw------- 1 root root 3106771787 Feb 27 12:39 tech.tar.gz

# gzip -t tech.tar.gz

gzip: tech.tar.gz: invalid compressed data--crc error

gzip: tech.tar.gz: invalid compressed data--length error

This tends to happen with larger files, but also fails on some smaller
files, for example one failure is a file of 175MB.

The filesystem is ext3, and I have fsck'd the partition that both the
data and the gzips reside on (no errors found).

Gzip is version 1.3.3 but I have also compiled and tried 1.3.9

I have also tried to compress and uncompress with lzop (v1.01), with
very similar results.

Any suggestions or help would be very gratefully received.

Cheers,

Andy

.

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