the corner office

...I'd probably be able to go buy myself an ice cream or something.

With my ADSL being capped for international bandwidth, it makes sense to go absolutely apeshit with local bandwidth before the clock strikes midnight on the 30th and the local + international counter gets reset. Internet Solutions' ftp site has a local Gentoo mirror (amongst other things), so now's the time.

Having learned my lesson, I'm backing up the source files as I go along. To this end, I realised that rsync is far simpler and more powerful than I had always thought. Digging through the man page, I realised that you don't need to set up and run an rsync server or daemon to sync files between machines: as long as the rsync client is installed on both, you can piggy-back everything through something like ssh and the clients on both end are invoked as needed to do their magic. So with about as much fuss as a command-line copy, I was able to push a backup of my /usr/portage/ directory to a back-up server, and mirror the files onto another hard drive on this machine.

Neat!