Distributed administration of gentoo - easy or hard?

 	I've recently begun admining a few gentoo boxes in a distributed 
setting (mainly boxes that my friends asked me to set up for them on a 
personal, at-home basis.) I'm noticing that while portage makes updates 
alot smoother, compiling them takes forever, especially on initial 
installations. OpenOffice installs and updates are particularly heinous.
 	How do you guys handle this? Do you configure all your systems the 
same, and set up a binary package host on the system somewhere for them to 
fetch binaries from? Or do you just use straight portage?
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