[gentoo-server] installing outside of portage

[Ben Munat]

[Please excuse the rank newbie question.] My brother and I are 
moderately experienced with linux and fairly new to gentoo. We recently 
rented a gentoo server and I installed a bunch of software from the 
portage tree. This included bind. However, when I went to set up bind, I 
got confused. Wound up putting it off a couple times, and threw the 
responsibility for configuring it off onto my brother.

Well, my brother enlisted the aid of a linux sysadmin friend of his. The 
friend seems to know linux very well but is not familiar with gentoo. 
When things did not work as he expected, he recompiled bind and set it 
up from scratch. The result is that we now have a working install of 
bind, but it is not from the portage tree.

So, my question is, what are my risks here? Does this only mean that 
future "emerge world"s will leave bind behind? Is there some other risk 
that I don't know about? If I just emerge bind again, will it hose the 
settings this guy did for us? (I would assume so.) Just how bad is it to 
have software (esp. important stuff like our name server) installed from 
outside the tree?

Thanks,

Ben