[distcc] distcc problems...

[ahasty at chiaro.com]

Hello 

I read about distcc in the magazine CUJ a couple of months ago and have been working to get it operational and in our build environment. I love the tool and I'll be providing some data for you results page in the near future. 

I am on a team of 12 developers and we have 4 architectures, and about 12 targets to build  if the entire tree is compiled (as it is for a checkin). Needless to say, distcc can help us.
I'm using distcc with the Wind River Systems compilers (ccmips, ccsimso, ccppc, ccarm) which are essentially GNU gcc compilers. 
I have found that I can cut the build time in half with some small changes to our makefiles. 
However, when I have multiple builds going at the same time, using the same set of servers, I get one of the following three messages.

distccmon-text[10782] (dcc_close) ERROR: failed to close fd4: Stale NFS file handle
or
distccmon-text[960] (dcc_mon_read_state) Warning: wrong magic number: /home/ahasty/.distcc/state/binstate_12563
or
distcc[2679] (dcc_close) ERROR: failed to close fd7: Resource temporarily unavailable

These messages come out on the stderr. I have turned on the VERBOSE flags on the servers, as well as enabled logging to a file, and I have not been able to find any error information there. 

When this happens our build process fails :(  because we have strict error/warning checking.
So I need to figure out what could be causing this problem.
I have the distccd running in daemon mode, with a total of 10 jobs possible on each of 5 servers. 
I can get these messages when I have just two people accessing the same set of 5 servers. I have set the -j5, or 10, with the same effect. 

distcc 2.12.1 sparc-sun-solaris2.7 (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632)
  built Jan 23 2004 11:31:58


Has anyone had experience with these errors? What should I be looking for to get them fixed so that I can use this tool with the rest of my team.

Thanks for any help or advice. 

Alan Hasty
Chiaro Networks, Richardson, TX. 
ahasty(at)chiaro.com