OK, so I uploaded a 3GB ISO file to my site for future downloads. Unfortunately for me, whenever I attempted to download the file I was met by:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /path/to/file/nameoffile.iso on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Dumb. Good thing I have access to the log files. The error from apache stated:

value too large for defined data type

More dumb. As this is from my hosting company I can’t just go ahead and update the kernel or replace any config files I need. So I just needed to be able to compress the file and make multiple archives. Thanks to some command line tar I can do just that:

tar cvzf - nameofyourfile.iso | split -d -b 700m - nameyouwantyourfiletobe.iso.tar.gz.
Notice the trailing ‘.’ – this is used to create filename.iso.tar.gz.01, filename.iso.tar.gz.02 etc.

Now I just have to play the waiting game for it to finish.

AND if you want to restore it later to ISO format:
cat filename.iso.tar.gz.* | tar xvzf -