[Bug-tar] We found a bug in TAR

[Bordács Péter [Info Station Kft.]]

Dear Gnu Team,

Sorry for my bad English I'm Hungarian from Central-Europe.
I found a bug in tar. If I can't send this message to the right address 
please inform me.
I think this problem is very important - and not only for me.

The situation is the following:
We have many of Debian Linux servers with two Debian versions. This 
servers are branded HP Proliant servers. The servers working good and it 
has a redundant hardware RAID arrays. All servers was enough CPU, memory 
and HDD capacity.

One group of this Debian servers has Debian 5.0.8 64-bit operating 
system with TAR version 1.20.
The other group of this Debian servers has Debian 6.0.4 64-bit operating 
system with TAR version 1.23.

This servers are webhosting servers and we make the user's backup at 
every night with the following command:

tar -czf /backup-location/backup.tgz /userdatas/userfolder

We found a problem in the Debian 6.0.4 (TAR 1.23).
If I make a backup which .tar.gz file size is bigger than ~2GB some 
files content are corrupted.
If I make this backup (from same user's data) in the older version of 
Debian (5.0.8 with TAR 1.20) - the backup content aren't bad.
I create a test without gzip switch so the command was:

tar -cf /backup-location/backup.tgz /userdatas/userfolder

The problem was still in the newer Debian and TAR. So I think the 
problem is with the TAR and not the gzip (or gzip option).

I attached two files.
This files are same: an user's email.
I renamed the e-mail file's with "-good" and with "-bad" ending.
If you open this attachments you will see the difference. This e-mail 
file was a normal unencrypted file as the "-good" ending is shown.
But with the TAR (v1.23) the file contain is shown as an encoded file.

I tested this problem more servers and this problem was problem on all 
Debian 6.0.4 (TAR 1.23) servers. And this problems is not coming on the 
Debian 5.0.8 (TAR 1.20) servers.

Do you known this problem?
If not can you test this? This problem isn't coming if the .tar.gz file 
size is smaller then 2GByte.

Please answer for me at all events.
I'm waiting your answer.

Best regards,
Peter Bordacs

1317287241.H65486P14535.bergman.dima.hu%3A2,Sa-good
Description: Text document

1317287241.H65486P14535.bergman.dima.hu%3A2,Sa_bad
Description: Text document