[Nottingham] data transfers causing hard hangs

[James Gibbon]

This is an irritating one.

When moving large amounts (say more than 40g) of data from one drive to
another or over the network to another host, in either case using tar
or rsync, the computer receiving the data will more often than not
freeze at some point during the transfer. All the machines I've
experienced this with are essentially the same hardware, running Ubuntu
with the same kernel (2.6.15-26-amd64-generic) - so I'm unsure if it's
hardware or software.

Anyone else experienced this problem? There are no clues in the logs;
the box just freezes with the  disk LED on until someone comes along and
presses the reset button.

James