[distcc] distcc with xinetd... how?

[Brian Hall]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2002 at 06:42:47PM +1000, Martin Pool wrote:
> On  7 Aug 2002, Brian Hall <brianwhall at pcisys.net> wrote:
> > 
> > What is the magic incantation to get distcc to be spawned correctly
> > xinetd? No matter what username I specify in the stanza, distcc always
> > tries to create subdirs in /root/tmp for its temp files. How do I get
> > around this? (see sample at the very bottom)
> 
> distcc respects the $TMPDIR environment variable when creating its
> scratch directory.  I suspect you have that set in root's .profile.
> If you unset it in the shell script that launches xinetd, or set it to
> something not in root's path, then it should be fine.

OK, I thought I was setting TMDIR correctly in /etc/profile; my
mistake was that when I restarted xinetd, it took the TMPDIR setting
from the current shell, instead of starting a new shell for xinetd
processing as I expected. Ooops. Works now, and I added security to
the xinetd distccd stanza using bind (not needed really, but fits with
the defense in layers concept).


Oh, I still have a question. I run tmpfs on all my systems, hoping for
a small speed gain. I notice that it doesn't support sendfile, and
distccd falls back to another method. I am thinking that there should
be a slight speed hit because of this fallback, judging by the logfile.

Now, should I point distccd to a real filesystem or what for the
best distccd performance? Should there be a --no-sendfile option if it
is known in advance that sendfile is not available?


BTW, at the moment my client and servers on running on Mandrake 8.2,
all i686 architecture (mix of Pentium Pro and PIIIs).

-- 
http://www.bigfoot.com/~brihall
Linux Consultant

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