[distcc] discovering the distccd hosts on a DHCP LAN?

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Timothee,

> While most of the distcc hosts I use have a fixed IP, I have a number of
> machines that live on the LAN and get their IPs assigned by dhcp. I'm
> looking for a way to use those for distcc as well. I've seen the FAQ,
> and mention of centralized manager / TeamBuilder thing, but I don't
> really want to move away to a completely different solution.

Why don't you simply configure your DHCP server to always assign the
same IPs to these few machines? The key feature of DHCP is that the
hosts configuration is centralized on the server, the fact that the IPs
are attributed in a dynamic way is not mandatory. You can attach IPs to
MAC Ethernet addresses "permanently".

In general using machines with dynamic addresses as servers don't sound
like a good idea to me.

Another possibility would be to access these machines by their name
rather than IP. This moves the difficulty from the clients to the DNS.
>From there, either find a way to have your DHCP service update the DNS
table, or have clients themselves register to the DNS. I don't know
exactly how this can be done, as I never needed this myself, but
solutions already exist for sure, and that's definitely where I would
be turning to if I really wanted to host services on a dynamically-IP'd
machine.

Hope that helps,
--
Jean Delvare