[distcc] distccmon time sync issues

[Martin Pool]

On 13 Feb 2004, "Ahlborn, James T (MED)" <James.Ahlborn at med.ge.com> wrote:
> hi,
> I discovered, through much pain and agony, that the distcc monitors check
> the time stamp of the state files before using them.  this is a good idea,
> until your systems start having time sync issues.  in my case, my home
> directory was on a box which was 2 minutes behind my development box.  this
> meant that all of my state files seemed to be two minutes old. 
> the distcc
> monitors, then, ignored those state files.  this was very frustrating
> because the distcc monitors showed no state despite the fact that the state
> files where there and accessible.  i would suggest some sort of feature
> addition to the monitors such that if the monitors continually detect state
> files that seem "out of date", that they suggest to the user that there may
> be time sync issues (similar to other build tools which may suggest "time
> skew detected" or similar).

Sorry to hear that.

It is a really good idea to use NTP to synchronize clocks on NFS
machines.  In fact it is pretty dangerous not to use it.

Didn't it cause problems with other things?  Even emacs can get upset
about "file changed while you were editing it" if there is time skew.

I'm not sure if there is any easy way for distcc to detect this
problem though.  I think Make can do it because any one machine both
reads and writes the directory, but the distcc monitor (at the moment)
only reads.  It is probably possible for Make to give you an incorrect
build without any warning.

--
Martin
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