Local emerge --sync Mirror

[Seth W. Klein]

I'm up to three Gentoo machines around me and one elsewhere, and I've been seeing the use for nightly syncing. I've been syncing by hand about once a week, but experience shows that I tend to miss a week if I'm unusually involved in something, and there's far too much chance that the week I miss will be the one when some attention requiring upgrade hits stable. This leaves the choice of picking the simple upgrades out by hand, which uses much more time, or raising the priority of the complex upgrade artificially. If I sync nightly, I can have a pending upgrade report generated and quickly set those to run before the next nightly sync if they're simple.

Unfortunately, I don't want three redundant syncs happening every night and neither do the Gentoo rsync mirror admins. I've wondered for a while about setting up a local mirror, but it never reached high enough priority until now. Turns out, it's pretty trivial.

The mirror machine runs rsyncd with a simple config exposing (most of) its /usr/portage. Most of the config is already in the default /etc/rsyncd.conf. The other machines get SYNC set in make.conf. For the details, the Gentoo rsync documentation is nicely complete and correct.