WGET Shows "403: Forbidden" Error -- Apache 1.x Filesize Issue

Man, another one of these difficult-to-title posts! I can see this will be a recurring problem for me! :P

Problem:

I had a large backup file on one of my web servers that I wanted to transfer to another web server using WGET instead of doing the drastically-slower transfer to/from my office workstation through a DSL connection. In my situation, it appears that Apache 1.x doesn't support transferring large files >2GB in size, but Apache 2.x does. Using a simple WGET command like this:

wget http://www.domain-name-here.com/filename.tar.gz

rendered the "403: Forbidden" error. Trying to access this same file from a Web browser got me the same problem, which started pointing fingers in weird directions for the problem space. The file had proper permissions and should have been accessible... until I realized a simple "test.txt" file worked just fine. Hmmmm... it turns out this wasn't just permissions issues or such, but must be due to the Apache size limitation (or other such issue that doesn't matter, because I found a solution for my case...)

This Worked:

My solution was made easier since I have full control over both Web servers, but hopefully this helps people in a general sense anyway. Both servers run Red Had Linux Enterprise and Cpanel for the control panel. One server (the "source" of the file) is running Apache 1.x and the other ("destination") is Apache 2.2x... whether that would ultimately matter for this solution is likely a non-issue. I ended up going an FTP route instead of HTTP anyway, but you at least know the full picture FYI.

I don't have anonymous FTP turned on anywhere and didn't want to get into that, so I just created a new FTP account on the source server's cpanel account that had the big (7GB) backup tar file. From here, I was able to SSH into my destination server and run a simple WGET command to copy the file from one server to the other across the Intarweb:

wget ftp://ftpuser+domain.com:password@www.example.com/path/to/ftpuser/backup-file-name.tar.gz

This uses a login/password appropriately-formatted for a cPanel system (user name is: "user+domain.tld" in this case). What we end up with is a direct server-to-server file transfer of a large file that uses an FTP account. This would also work if you had anonymous FTP set up and just left off the username:password combo, just using the URL directly.

Of course, there are a ton of ways to do what I wanted to do, but maybe this method will fire off some ideas for similar things for people about using these commands. I thought it was at least slightly satisfying to solve this and learn a bit more about using wget that I didn't know before.

Cheers,
Hoza