[distcc] Proposed Enhancements/Changes

[Martin Pool]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 11:39 PM, KELEMEN Peter <Peter.Kelemen at cern.ch> wrote:
> * Fergus Henderson (fergus at google.com) [20080725 09:16]:
>
>> It would be great to quantify that.  How much slower is SSH
>> than unautenticated distcc?  And how much slowdown would be
>> acceptable for you?
>
> We haven't measured that yet.  But we expect something like what
> Martin said.
>
>> - the need for the right .ssh config files (distcc could be
>> modified to create them automatically if you don't have them)
>
> This implies local storage for the users' .ssh files on
> each distcc node... something we would like to avoid.  The
> administration of these files will soon become nightmarish as the
> number of nodes/users grows.

As far as I can see you have to have *some* per-machine private state
to identify that machine.  You do not necessarily have to give users
home directories.  Instead give the clients host keys and tell the
servers to allow HostBasedAuthentication.

Of course that doesn't fix the other performance issues with SSH.  But
if the network is untrusted I think you do at some level have to do
most of the work SSH does: encryption, integrity checking, and so on.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>