[tlug] Using EC2 for distcc/mounting local devices on EC2

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

During yesterdays technical meeting Mauro mentioned he was using EC2 for
distributed compiling of Gentoo packages for his laptop.

I also have an ancient laptop and I have been using a similar approach
to compile packages, however I found distcc to be a bit slow so instead
I simply mount the laptop over nfs on my desktop machine then chroot to it.

This approach effectively turns my laptop into a NAS.  You need to be
careful with some packages that check folder the /proc.  If you setup a
VPN with an EC2 instance you could do the same thing for a machine
behind a firewall.

/etc/fstab
laptop:/      /mnt/laptop       nfs     noauto,rw       0 0
laptop:/boot /mnt/laptop/boot nfs     noauto,rw       0 0

# mount base filesystems over nfs
mount /mnt/laptop
mount /mnt/laptop/boot

# bind desktop static /dev folder
mount -o bind /dev          /mnt/laptop/dev
mount -o bind /dev/pts      /mnt/laptop/dev/pts
mount -o bind /dev/shm      /mnt/laptop/dev/shm

# bind desktop /proc and /sys
mount -o bind /proc         /mnt/laptop/proc
mount -o bind /proc/bus/usb /mnt/laptop/proc/bus/usb
mount -o bind /sys          /mnt/laptop/sys

# use desktop portage tree
mount -o bind /usr/portage  /mnt/laptop/usr/portage

# store generated packages on desktop machine
mount -o bind /root/laptop/packages /mnt/laptop/usr/portage/packages

# store kernel sources on desktop
mount -o bind /root/laptop/src /mnt/laptop/usr/src

# mount tmpfs on /tmp and /var/tmp/portage
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/laptop/var/tmp/portage
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /mnt/laptop/tmp

# chroot into environment to compile
linux32 chroot /mnt/laptop/

Edward