Configuring dmake

At one point I had set up my two Sun Blade 1000s to work together for distributed compiling with Sun Studio's dmake. Doing this took a little bit of work since dmake relies on rlogin, which is disabled by default in newer versions of Solaris. This is what I did.

dmake.conf doesn't usually exist after a fresh install of Sun Studio and must be created in /etc/opt/SPROdmake on each compile server. Since my systems each had dual processors, my dmake.conf files all only had one line and looked like this:

max_jobs: 2

Each user who will be compiling also needs a .dmakerc file in his or her home directory which establishes which compile server groups should be used. In my case, I had two compile servers, black and white which both had Sun Studio installed in /opt/SUNWspro/bin. This is what my .dmakerc looked like:

group "blades" {
   host black { jobs = 2, path="/opt/SUNWspro/bin" }
   host white { jobs = 2, path="/opt/SUNWspro/bin" }
}

Provided the two servers, black and white, are in good communication (have synced up /etc/host files, /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, NFS-mounted source directories that can be seen on all compile servers (such as would be the case on a properly set up NIS network), this will let dmake launch jobs on both black and white at their maximum capacity (2 jobs). Also, I had Sun Studio installed in identical locations on each machine, but these locations apparently do not need to be the same.

One last catching point for me was getting rsh to work. At present, dmake requires that you be able to rsh commands to all servers specified in .dmakerc; I do not like this as I prefer ssh, and in fact it is possible to inject a symlink for /usr/bin/rsh to /usr/bin/ssh in dmake's path.

To set up rsh, first set up /etc/hosts.equiv. Mine contained:

localhost
white
black

This has to be the same on all compile servers (in my case, black and white).

The next step is to make sure the necessary services are working. Check and make sure rlogin and shell are running:

# svcs -a | grep rlogin
online 17:02:14 svc:/network/login:rlogin

# svcs -a | grep shell
disabled 16:25:54 svc:/network/shell:default
disabled 16:25:54 svc:/network/shell:kshell

It took me a while to realize that network/shell was required to use rsh (rather than rlogin, which is what rsh calls if you do not specify a command). To enable it,

# svcadm enable network/shell:default

Then dmake should work.