portage can't find the grubconfig distfile for 1.17; I looked using ncftp on several of the mirrors and it wasn't on any of them. ebuild for 1.17 should either be taken out of the updated port list or the distfile should be mirrored.
*** Bug 23778 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
added to gentoo mirrors added to my public html dir (http://cvs.gentoo.org/~mholzer/grubconfig-1.17.tar.gz) version bumped stable to 1.19