[gentoo-user] How to update portage offline with minimal impact?

[BRM <bm_witness@yahoo.com>]

I have a couple Sparc systems. One has been running Gentoo for a long
time - installed using Gentoo 2006, not updated since due to the issue
I'm about the discuss - and the other is a near identical system that
might get Gentoo 2007 installed. Both are on two separate networks and
have no communication between them.

The first system does have some Internet access through a firewall, but
it doesn't really work, at least for this purpose; so it's just as good
as not having any access at all for this purpose.

The second system may or may not have Internet access, so for now let's
just assume it doesn't. It's really this second system that I want to
figure the problem out for.

In either case, I can't update portage using the normal method of
'emerge --sync'. So, I'm trying to figure out a solution that would
enable me to update the systems. Under Slackware, I'd just point
pkgtool to the CD media and install from that, just like during
installation. Is there a similar approach for Gentoo? How do I overcome
the source mirror issue too so that the systems don't try to download
stuff from the web?

I could probably host an rsync server on the local systems to host
portage, but how would I keep it up to date? Would I simply be able to
extract a tarball into the directory rsync is serving up?

I can get large tarballs or ISOs from other systems to these systems;
but they won't be able to download them themselves.

I noticed the Manual Download info in the FAQ:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/faq.xml#manualdownload

However, that is not a solution I can use as I might not be the long
term maintainer, and I'd like an easier solution as it requires a lot
of work to download stuff. I'd like a solution similar to the
following:

# tar xvjf /portage-sources-<data>.tar.bz2 -C /my-portage-sources
# tar xvjf /portage-<date>.tar.bz2 -C /my-portage
# emerge --sync --portage-source /my-portage
# emerge world -vuD --sources /my-portage-sources

If there isn't a solution, I might look into how to make a solution
(not sure).

TIA,

Ben
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