trick for hosting large DVD ISOs on Apache

I recently needed to make a large file (a DVD ISO) available from a Webserver running Apache. The ISO was around 3.1GB, and Apache wouldn't serve it (the file wouldn't even show up in the mod_autoindex listing).

So I split up the original file into smaller chunks:

split -b 1073741824 huge_DVD.iso

This created 4 files called xaa, xab, xac, and xad. The first three were 1073741824 bytes each, and xad was around 31MB. I renamed the files (in order) to huge_DVD.chunk1, huge_DVD.chunk2, huge_DVD.chunk3, and huge_DVD.chunk4.

I posted the 'chunks' to the Webserver along with a text file containing the SHA1 checksum of the original file. The original file can be reassembled and its checksum computed in a single read by running the following command (after downloading the chunks):

cat huge_DVD.chunk* | tee huge_DVD.iso | openssl dgst -sha1