On Sunday, 28 April 2019 21:37:19 BST [email protected] wrote: > - Peter Humphrey suggests: > - http ftp proxy > > In what way is that different from rsync which I thought I'd already > configured?
I assume that means you're using rsync to synchronise the portage database. Then, whatever you use to fetch distfiles for installation, it uses ftp or http transport to fetch them. Squid sits on the network with its cache of previous fetches and supplies whatever hasn't changed, thus at least halving network traffic if you have two or more Gentoo machines to maintain. You can also point your browsers at squid (that's what it's meant for, in fact); their responsiveness also improves. Since I had fibre broadband I hadn't bothered with squid, but after installing it on a local machine yesterday I found it still made an observable difference. Squid doesn't need a powerful machine to serve a small LAN; I have it running happily on an old single-core, 32-bit Atom N270 box. Although squid apparently scales well up to much larger user numbers, it's remarkably easy to set up - I had it running in under half an hour. -- Regards, Peter.
