Use yum to manage your packages and stop using rpm!

I hate seeing the RPMDB altered message when doing yum updates!

Transaction Summary
=======================================================================================================================
Install 1 Package
Upgrade 1 Package

Total size: 309 M
Is this ok [y/d/N]: y
Downloading packages:
Running transaction check
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded
Running transaction
Warning: RPMDB altered outside of yum.

For that reason, I tell sysadmins when installing or upgrading rpms to use:

yum -y install <rpm file>

and to use

yum -y remove <rpm name>

to remove the rpm you want.

Don’t skip inutoc . !!! (AIX)

I’m not an AIX expert. I’ve only been on an AIX command line probably 3-4 hours at the most in my entire career.

I just know that when you’re installing AIX packages, make sure you run inutoc . I have some notes on AIX here.

Basically, after you copy an ipfl file into a directory, say /tmp, you will need to run the 2 commands like this:

inutoc .
installp -ac -gXY -d. ipfl

Otherwise the install will fail with some message that I can’t remember.

Adventures in the quest to install Lion on my MacBook Pro …

This was pretty fun. I had to install a new HD in my Mac. Since Lion was out and I was still on Snow Leopard, I figured I might as well upgrade that too. I downloaded and burned it on a dvd. I figured, After swapping out the hard drive, I could install from DVD. Unfortunately, the DVD didn’t read. Damn! It was a pain to swap the disks and I didn’t want to do it again. So I tried booting from USB – attached the old disk to a usb enclosure and it booted! Linux couldn’t do that! Windows couldn’t do that! This was awesome. From there, I was able to just install Lion via the downloaded dmg file and pointed the install to the newly installed disk.

By the way, trying to burn a dmg file on Linux or Windows is a pain in the ass. I tried with both and gave up after about an hour of google searches and trying different converter products.