[Bioclusters] Local copy of NCBI

[Osborne, John]

Hi everyone,
What are people out there doing to get a local copy of NCBI's databases?  I
mean RefSeq, dbSNP, taxonomy, etc...  We've been updating our copy ad-hoc by
ftp, are most people just putting this into a cron job?

I've heard that the NCBI tookkit offers something like this (to get daily
updates via web services or something) but I don't know where to look.
getseq looks suspicious but I need to configure it using entrez2, which
needs X Windows, which needs vibrant, which means RH dependency hell...  Is
there a simple commandline way to get get a seequence from NCBI and keep a
local copy of NCBI?

 -John