Microsoft has apparently decided to put a limit on how big of a file you can download from the IIS FTP server on their non-”server” operating systems. Windows XP Professional would be a non-server one, for example. This is a completely arbitrary limit, just to try to convince people to buy a more expensive operating system to transfer larger files. It’s the kind of thing that, in my opinion, is more likely to make people move to free operating systems where you don’t have to deal with artificial limits like that. But that’s another issue.
The bigger problem for me was that they messed up the limit. The limit is 2 GB. If you try to download a file under 2 GB in IIS’s FTP server, it will work. If you try to download something over 4 GB, you get an error saying “Cannot send file larger than 4 gigabytes”. That would seem to imply that the limit is 4 GB, right?
But if you try anything between 2 and 4 GB, it just fails. You get a transfer failed message from the FTP server that doesn’t mention the file size, and you don’t get your file. Let me tell you, troubleshooting that was a real pain. It was only through luck that I tried a file over 4 GB and got that more specific error message, and then did some searching to read that there’s a 2 GB limit.
Extremely annoying. This was going to be my way of getting MPEGs off of my PVR and re-encoding them so they’ll take up less space. Now I need to install some new FTP server on the PVR box, when it doesn’t have a keyboard or mouse on it. (I wound up using the War FTP Daemon since it’s free and hopefully doesn’t have the same issues as IIS. Turns out that is has other issues, though, but that’s a topic for another post).
So, short version: Just avoid Windows’s built in FTP server.