So we already have a single location where all gentoo machines store their distfiles. We have most of the latest distfiles for all popular portage apps. If we served the distfiles up on a webserver with an alias to it like http://mirror.restek.wwu.edu/gentoo/distfiles/ then students could put the following line in the /etc/make.conf and get much faster downloads of gentoo distfiles.
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirror.restek.wwu.edu/gentoo http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu"
Their portage setup will automatically try the main gentoo mirror if ours fails. This would really help out people that are using gentoo and wanting to say install X or something else that requires almost 100megs of downloads. It will also save all the bandwidth that would have been used by people downloading these files themselves.
We could do something similar for FreeBSD or other operating systems. We could have a whole page on the public site explaining all of our Open Source OS local mirror stuff.