[distcc] getting distcc to compile without localhost

[Chris Robison]

What is required to prevent distcc from using localhost?

I am using distcc to speed up builds in Gentoo, and so far it's working 
pretty well. The problem is that I have a slow machine and a faster 
server to help it, and so I think I'd get better performance if the slow 
local machine were not compiling at all. At any rate, I'd like to try it 
to see.

At the moment, distcc is dividing up compilation evenly between the two 
machines. I have only one entry in /etc/distcc/hosts, the IP address of 
the remote server. Localhost is not listed in the file.  I can run 
distcc --show-hosts, and it also only returns the remote IP address. Yet 
when I do an emerge, the compilation is still evenly split between the 
two computers.

I asked around on IRC, and one response was that I had to include 
"localhost/0" in /etc/distcc/hosts, to force it to send zero jobs to 
localhost.  I tried adding this entry to the file along with the 
existing remote IP address, and immediately after the change, distcc 
started sending ALL compiles to localhost. Changing it back also 
immediately restored the original 50/50 behavior.

Either way, the verbose output from distcc shows nothing that appears to 
be an error; I can post it if it helps.

This is a brand new Gentoo install, running distcc 3.1, portage 
2.1.6.11, gcc 4.3.2, and the server is an amd64 host set up to 
cross-compile (which seems to be working perfectly).

As a separate issue, so far I have yet to see distccmon-text output 
anything but blank lines, running on either machine.

Thanks in advance,

  --chris