File too large error on AFS

Problem

You might get this error when you create a file or copy some files in a AFS filesystem: File too large

Solution

This error message is misleading because I found that the file I was creating or copying was not large at all. In fact, an attempt to create an empty file also gave this error!

On investigation, I found that this error happens because the AFS filesystem seems to have a limit of 64435 files in any given directory. If your AFS directory already has this many files, any attempt to create or copy over a file gives the above error.

One possible solution is to archive the files using tar and copy that archive file to AFS.

Tried with: OpenAFS 1.6.1-1 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS