[gentoo-server] multiple gentoo boxes, master file fetcher & override fetch restriction

[TRauMa]

Hi there,

I admin multiple gentoo boxes and built a "poor man gentoo mirror 
structure" the following way: one box, my desktop, where I install the 
latest and greatest software, serves its distfiles via ftp and all the 
other boxes have it in their mirror list. They occasionaly have to d/l 
something from the great inet themselves but I can live with that, I 
just want to be nice to the gentoo mirrors, not set one up myself. I 
decided against an NFS-mounted distfiles dir b/c I didn't want two boxes 
downloading the same file to conflict.
For syncing the portage tree, I "emerge sync" manually on the master box 
and then use rsync over ssh locally to get the latest ebuilds on the 
clients. As /usr/portage/distfiles on the master is empty (the files are 
stored elsewhere) this has the automatical benefit of removing the 
distfiles from the clients.

Now I have two questions:
1. is it save to generate the metadata on the server and then just pull 
it in on the clients? I noticed that emerge does the quarterly updates 
on first run after a sync but doesn't build metadata again (on the 
clients). I'm fine with that, as on some of the slower machines this 
lasts ages, but is it save? All the machines are "x86".
2. How can I tell portage to ignore fetch restricitions? If I encounter 
one, I manually pull in the file as portage tells me to, but I'm not 
keen on pulling it on every client, too. So it would be perfect if I 
could tell the clients to just try and fetch the restricted files from 
the local mirror.

Thanks for reading ;-)
    Thomas