ports/distfiles via NFS or SSH

[Peter Kryszkiewicz]

I have several machines networked using NFS mounts or SSH and scp. Only one
machine has internet connectivity - a laptop (machine vbear) with a wireless
card (I'm in a temporary location for a few weeks and only wireless is
available here).

I tried to mount the ports tree on this machine to the other machines
(machine mfc for instance) with:

#mfc> cd /usr
#mfc> mount_nfs vbear:/usr/ports ports

and then installing the needed port on mfc. What happens is that the working
directories and the entire local ports tree gets written to /var, so that I
get /var/ports/usr/ports/devel/xxgdb/work.... and so on. /var fills up very
quickly and I soon get "disk full" errors.

How can I avoid this?

I believe the solution is to point the ports Makefile to a different (local)
working directory but point fetch to grab distfiles from the (remote)
laptop, but I'm not sure how to do this.

regards,
Peter Kryszkiewicz