Portage "Central Station". Is it possible?

[faz]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of building a gentoo based server. This one is constantly hooked up to the Internet. All my other Gentoo systems communicate thru that server with everything else.

I want to give this server as a sort of "Portage Central Station" role. This is the idea:

- Let a crontab job "emerge rsync" every 24h or so.
- Prefetch all new stuff without building it
- All Gentoo "workstations" have their DISTDIR pointing at the distfiles dir on the server
- All Gentoo "workstations" share a common repository of ebuilds, so a rsync on the server will be sufficient.

The first three are possible, i know for sure.
The last one i don't know. Can I just reroute PORTDIR to the central server to be shared there or are their other things in PORTDIR that can't be shared. I'm thinking of the world file. If so, is there a way to put does apart somehow.

I'm not a portage expert, be this setup would cut be most ideal. Also for administrators of "real company's" with lot's of workstations

Thanks for any hints on this

[fifo]

I haven't tried it, but you should be able to just share the whole portage tree (/usr/portage/) between machines. This is what's updated by "emerge sync". All the per machine files (like the world file) are stored under /var/cache/edb/ and /var/db/.

[AlterEgo]

I'm sharing /usr/portage over an NFS share; so: the portage tree, the distfiles and the packages I built (emerge -b) are stored there as well.
3 Machines use it problem free.

[faz]

Thanks guys, i'll try it