I'm setting up distcc in my organization. I've built a "proof of concept" cluster of about 30 SuSE 64 bit Opterons. I plan to get this working on 32 bit Debian machines, Solaris boxes and Mac OSX boxes as well, and need to set up init scripts for each.
In addition, I need to allow users to stop/suspend the daemon when they don't want the load on their computer. I've started doing the following:
- Change distccd to be a SUID executable so that users can do "/etc/init.d/distccd start".
- Modify the "start-stop-daemon" open source C program to hard code all values for location of the binary and make it only do "stop".
Rename the executable to "distccd-stop". Also make this executable SUID.
- Use "distccd-stop" inside "/etc/init.d/distccd stop"
I'm also planning on adding:
- Something like "/etc/init.d/distccd temporarystop 4" which would stop the daemon for 4 hours but start an "at" job to restart it after a
limited period of time. Maybe only allow root to call "stop" and only allow non-root users to do "temporarystop" somehow.
- "/etc/init.d/distccd start 2" which would tell distccd to accept an opitonal number of simultaneous connections.
2 questions:
1. Is allowing users to start/stop the daemon on thier own machinies a good/bad, commonly/uncommonly done thing?
2. I don't care too much about security in this environment, but don't want to do anything rediculously stupid either. Is this a decent strategy?
I'll upload my OSX and Solaris init scripts and distccd-stop.c when they're ready if anyone thinks they would be useful.
Thanks for any insight.
-Dan Sturtevant
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