[gentoo-user] Emerge server

[Peter Humphrey]

Hello list,

I'm setting my i5 workstation up to be an emerge host to a new Atom N550 box 
on the LAN. I've created a 32-bit chroot at /mnt/atom on the i5 box, written 
an init.d script to mount the Atom's whole file system on /mnt/atom/target 
over NFS, and set an alias
	tmerj='emerge --root=/target --jobs=5 --keep-going'
in /mnt/atom/etc/profile.d/profile_aliases.sh.

The Atom box has had nfs-utils installed at an early stage so that the 
workstation can do all the heavy work. Its /etc/exports file says
	/ 192.168.2.6(sync,rw,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check

This appears to be working, but for an odd wrinkle (and it's too early to 
declare success of the whole operation). Some packages, such as MySQL, when 
I've installed them this way have also been installed in parallel on the 
host machine. At least, that appeared to be happening because for several 
packages I had one job emerge " to /target/" and another emerge without that 
qualification. Yet when I cat /mnt/atom/var/lib/portage/world, it's empty.

How should I interpret this? Have I missed something in the setup? I'm also 
unsure of the effect of /proc and /sys being nfs-exported from the Atom, so I 
think I'll make the export a bit more selective (when gentoo-sources have 
finished being written to disk - it's been about 20 minutes so far).

Incidentally, one thing I've noticed is that the final stage of installing 
gentoo-sources, the writing to disk of all the files, takes many minutes 
because of the slow 2.5" disk in the Atom box. The rest of the operation, so 
far, is pleasingly quick - much better than building natively on the Atom.

-- 
Rgds
Peter