My 133Mhz Pentium does three things. First, it is a round-the-clock torrent slave. I drop in torrents over NFS, it downloads them automatically. I copy the results back.

Second, it’s a local “mirror” for the Crux repositories, and in turn serves them to two other Pentium machines in the house. Rather than tie up the repos with each machine syncing individually, two sync off the third.

And last, it compiles software updates on its own, on a nightly basis. Those compiled packages in turn get fed to the other two Crux-driven Pentiums, which saves me time and effort.

Setting it all up is a breeze. One three-line cron script washes out the port tree, syncs with the official servers and starts the updates.

I had to adjust things slightly a day ago though, because one particular package was causing problems: gcc.

gcc the pig was taking well over 24 hours to compile, and bogging down the machine so badly I could barely sign in to kill it off. It had swallowed up the vast majority of the processor and memory, and most of the swap space too.

I should have realized that some of those packages, although there are very few, would take quite a long time to build if they were updated. So I am partly to blame.

In any case, a quick --ignore=gcc added to the prt-get sysup command solved the problem. Happy days are here again. 🙄