pg_dump failure in tar format.

I've posted the information below twice to the admin list without getting a
solution, so I'm promoting it to a bug.

I'm not subscribed to the bug list, so please cc me on responses and I'll
try to supply information as needed.


I'm getting the following error message:

pg_dump: [tar archiver] could not write to tar member (wrote 39, attempted
166)

Here are the particulars:

-I'm running this command: "pg_dump -Ft prod > prod.dump.tar" (The database
is named prod)

-The dump gets about 1/4 of the way through, and then gives me the error
message and dies.

-I'm running PostgreSQL version 7.3.2.

-There is plenty of disk space available.

-The same command on the same database and server with same specs worked
last week when I was on V7.2.1.

-Since upgrading, more data has been added, but the structure of the
database is unchanged.

-Using the -v switch shows me that it always quits on the same table, but
otherwise adds no new information.

-The part of the error message in parentheses changes on each run. For
instance, on the last run, I got  "(wrote 64, attempted 174)" The rest of
the message remains consistent.

-The table it quits on is fairly large- about 2.6GB. It is both "wide"
because it contains a text field that is usually a few sentences of text,
and "long", containing 9,137,808 records. This is also the only table in our
database that is split into multiple files.

-A text dump using this command works fine and exports the entire database
without a problem: "pg_dump prod > prod.dump.text"

-I have set up an identical system (Same hardware, same software, same Data
in DB) to do testing on, and confirmed that I get the same error on this
system, so it appears to not be a hardware error or just a bad copy of the
software.

-Several folks suggested that I was hitting the 2GB file size limit. This is
not the case. Here is a snip from the console log on the second machine that
I'm using to diagnose with:


nickf@morgai:~$ pg_dump -Ft alpha > dump.tar
pg_dump: [tar archiver] could not write to tar member (wrote 110, attempted
398)
nickf@morgai:~$
nickf@morgai:~$
nickf@morgai:~$ ls -al dump.tar
-rw-r--r--    1 nickf    nickf    1388367872 Jul 21 14:49 dump.tar
nickf@morgai:~$


Thanks for looking this over- please let me know if anyone has any ideas
about this.

-Regards,
     -Nick

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Nick Fankhauser

    nickf@doxpop.com  Phone 1.765.965.7363  Fax 1.765.962.9788
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