During archiving from a slave the untaring can fail with files > 8GB. This is because the tar creator makes a corrupt archive. I think it doesn't properly null terminate the size value when the file size is gets to the 12th digit - which is a violation of tar spec (from Wikipedia tar article: Numeric values are encoded in octal numbers using ASCII digits, with leading zeroes. For historical reasons, a final NUL or space character should be used. Thus although there are 12 bytes reserved for storing the file size, only 11 octal digits can be stored. This gives a maximum file size of 8 gigabytes on archived files.)
Changing to gnutar might be nice to handle large files, or at least making the library error out when it hits large files rather than happily building corrupt archives.

Error caused by this bug (due to reading the corrupt header):

Archiving artifacts
ERROR: Publisher hudson.tasks.ArtifactArchiver aborted due to exception
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Negative time
at java.io.File.setLastModified(File.java:1258)
at hudson.FilePath.readFromTar(FilePath.java:1605)
at hudson.FilePath.copyRecursiveTo(FilePath.java:1530)
at hudson.tasks.ArtifactArchiver.perform(ArtifactArchiver.java:117)
at hudson.tasks.BuildStepMonitor$1.perform(BuildStepMonitor.java:19)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractRunner.perform(AbstractBuild.java:649)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractRunner.performAllBuildSteps(AbstractBuild.java:625)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractRunner.performAllBuildSteps(AbstractBuild.java:603)
at hudson.model.Build$RunnerImpl.post2(Build.java:161)
at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractRunner.post(AbstractBuild.java:572)
at hudson.model.Run.run(Run.java:1386)
at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:46)
at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:88)
at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:145)
Finished: FAILURE