On Mon, 2010-05-17 at 21:53 +0100, Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Mon, 17 May 2010 19:33:18 +0100, David W Noon wrote: > > > >I share my distfiles but I don't use FTP as that means storing copies > > >of the same file on each computer. Instead, I use NFS. /mnt/portage is > > >shared across all machines on the network and DISTDIR is set > > >to /mnt/portage/distfiles in each make.conf. > > > > I used to do that, but it meant my NFS server had to be running to > > perform any software maintenance on any box, so it became a single point > > of failure. The FTP approach allows each box to be self-reliant. > > Fair comment. I have DISTDIR on my mail server, so if that goes down, > I've more to worry about that a few tarballs. Even if it is inaccessible, > the other computers would simply download the files to the local > directory. > > > >Sharing /mnt/portage like this means I can also share my overlay across > > >the network at /mnt/portage/local. > > > > My boxes have different stuff in their overlays, and one uses no > > overlay packages at all. Sharing overlays doesn't make much sense for > > my set-up. > > It makes sense for me because everything is in one place, making > maintenance and backups simpler. Even if a package is only used on one > computer, for now, a central location still makes sense. >
As an alternative check out http-replicator - yes the clients do download to a local directory but that can be cleaned afterwards. It also allows download locally when you know you are taking the machine (laptop?) elsewhere. An advantage over NFS is it seems to handle parallel downloads of the same file so you can transparently build all machines in parallel without the downloads stepping on each other over a common NFS mount. I also use a tmfs store for distfiles on one machine with plenty of ram so thats a self-cleaning (on reboot :) alternative. I have used NFS as well and its ok for data stores http-replicator is much better. Beware - NFS can be slow and flakey if used for building over (/var/tmp/portage). The great thing about gentoo's build system is its so flexible! BillK
