Hi all, I have been running several Gentoo machines here at my house, and am currently up to 7 (or was it 8?) installs.
I have been trying to reduce my resource consumption and set up an rsync mirror long ago, so my [acting] server only syncs to the internet and all other devices point to it. That part is working fine, I've already moved it to the repos.conf configuration. Whenever I search for running a local distfiles mirror (on this list and on the web) it gets a bit murky. The way I see it is this can be done a couple of ways: 1. Set up a lighttpd server to serve the distfiles directory. This has the benefit of being able to sync machines outside my network, although I don't know if I'd expose it to the internet. The major issue I can see with this is that if the file doesn't exist, portage will crap out saying it's not available. What I don't know is if there's an easy way to "get around" this issue. </1.> 2. Export the distfiles directory. This seems to be a bit better of a solution, other than not being able to use it outside the LAN. However, cleaning this directory becomes a lot less trivial as tools used to clean it will assume that the current machine is the only machine using it and clobber other workstation's required distfiles. I suppose the easiest way to sync is to wipe it completely out and run `emerge -fe world` on all machines to rebuild it, but this would be a fair bit of work as well. </2.> With those two options, neither being perfect - it made me wonder if there's a Better Way(tm) to do this. In the case of a shared distfiles, it would be best if something was one the machine hosting the distfiles monitoring what workstation needed what file and only removing a file when no workstations request it. Alas, I don't think a tool such as that exists (although I didn't really look that hard.) Ideally, it would be nice to have some sort of caching proxy that could fetch the file as it was needed, but in searching for this I encountered so much noise in the search results I gave up for the time being. Anyone have any suggestions? Dan
