Hello worthy Monks and Nuns. I'm writing today because on Saturday (a couple days ago) I had a personal triumph: I got the tool distcc working across my LAN; at present providing support to a laptop running Linux from a desktop also running Linux. The speed-up in intensive compilations of some Perl extension modules is noticeable, for example, in building modules in the the Digest:: namespace, particularly with one module (I don't recall for sure which one) which had dozens of XS files to convert to C and compile.

I had distcc set up on my client machine (the laptop) months ago, at that time having made the little farm of symlinks recommended as the way to drive distcc in turn to drive gcc. What I didn't have working and couldn't get a handle on was the setup on the host(s), where the compilation is performed; in the file /etc/distcc/clients.allow I needed to define client hostname specifications in CIDR notation (for me, 192.168.1.0/24) for "allowed clients." Without that set up right, I kept seeing messages from distcc saying connection refused or variants on that.

Obviously big jobs like building the Linux kernel or Samba are where having something like distcc is really helpful. But it's just plain cool to have it working for Perl tasks too.

    Soren

Jul 07, 2025 at 16:22 UTC