Re: [gentoo-user] Hoping someone can help explain distcc to me

[victor romanchuk <rom@persimplex.net>]

> Both machines contain "distcc" in FEATURES. It's not using
> -march=native. I've tried various -jN values with no real difference
> in performance.

only client (your laptop) machine should be distcc featured. for server
(desktop) that feature is useless

> On the desktop, /etc/conf.d/distcc contains (among other things):
> DISTCCD_OPTS="${DISTCCD_OPTS} --allow 192.168.0.0/24"
> DISTCCD_OPTS="${DISTCCD_OPTS} --listen 192.168.0.100"

this is server distcc daemon configuration, one just instructs daemon on what
network interface to listen for incoming connections (interface with ip
192.168.0.100 in your case) and filter incoming distcc connections by source
address: allow only those coming from local network machines with ip addresses
192.168.0.1 to 192.168.0.254

then distccd have to be started: /etc/init.d/distccd start

> And /etc/distccd/hosts contains:
> 192.168.0.0/24

this file configures distcc client behavior (actually the configuration can be
complex, see distcc man page for details), but in trivial case (for home
computing) it might look like:

192.168.0.100/6 127.0.0.1/1

e.g the client is able to send up to 6 distcc jobs to 192.168.0.100 and limit to
one job at local machine. client's /etc/make.conf has to have distcc feature
enabled (FEATURES="distcc"). surely you can play with job distribution rules
around the network. `distcc --show-hosts` command displays what you configured.
the number of cuncurrently running jobs (-j flag) has to be not less than sum of
local and remote jobs

i had noticed that distcc is peevish about CFLAGS: these should be compatible on
both client and server. in my case i made these similar on both machines (laptop
is core2duo and desktop is core2quad; both are running  amd64 arch)

yet another way to install packages on weak notebook running it on the same arch
as desktop runs, - is to create binaries at powerful machine (while emerging or
with quickpkg utility) and share $PKGDIR with laptop

hth