Since getting my home server setup I’ve been struggling to increase the timeout during –sync. The server I’m using is a 400Mhz PII, 192MB of RAM tower that takes slightly longer to chew on a problem. At first I tried removing –compress and increasing –timeout in PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS but the results weren’t very satisfying. So I went back to reading more documentation, in make.conf(5) I found the magic option. It’s PORTAGE_RSYNC_INITIAL_TIMEOUT and it has a default value of 15 seconds. I changed that to 30 seconds and now it works like a charm. sigh… It took too long to find a simple fix like this.