Archive for August, 2008

Motorcycle > train

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

Had my motorcycle here in California for a few weeks now, and it turns out to cost less than half the price of taking a combination of bicycle and train to work – in addition to being way more convenient. The Caltrain costs about $8 a day, while I only need about $6 of gas for the bike every two days!

I do have to calculate repairs into that though – one of my rear brake pads just fell apart last week, so I’m just in getting it replaced. Even with that included it still doesn’t put the cost over the train.

Anyway, I should be back on the road again shortly :)

Posted in California | No Comments »

Forcing package reinstall using yum

Friday, August 1st, 2008

Due to some unfortunate circumstances, I’ve recently had to reinstall a few packages onto a RHEL 5 server. Specifically, some of the files provided by those packages had been accidentally deleted, and they weren’t included in any recent backup…

There is no option to tell yum to force the install of a package – if it appears in the rpm database, yum won’t install it. I was able to get around this by first removing the package from the db, using:

rpm -e --justdb --nodeps PACKAGE

Now that the package no longer appeared in the database, a simple:

yum install PACKAGE

Was enough to patch things up.

Posted in Systems | No Comments »