[distcc] Local vs. NFS lock files.

Martin Pool mbp at sourcefrog.net
Mon Apr 4 13:17:39 GMT 2005


On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 12:49 -0700, Donohue, Michael wrote:

> This is enough to convince me that NFS locking isn't hurting us at
> PayPal, anyway.   What exactly are the issues that arise elsewhere?

The main problem is that many people have NFS half-working, so that file
IO works but locks don't work.  This might be because NFS locks are
broken in your software (old Unix?) or because you forgot to run the
lock server (easily done on linux). Because locks and IO are handled by
different daemons and different protocols it's easy to have this and not
notice.  (In NFS4 they're a single protocol.)  Furthermore it seems that
if locks aren't working, the client OS will often just grant all locks.

In general NetApp servers seem to be the one case where NFS does work
pretty reliably... which is nice for netapp owners, but not so good for
conservative design. :-)

There is also this:

http://www.mail-archive.com/distcc@lists.samba.org/msg01325.html

If you know that NFS locks work then it's fine for you to put DISTCC_DIR
there.  It's not a great long-term solution for coordinating between
machines because obviously not everyone has a shared disk.

-- 
Martin

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