Sometimes you may have the need to download a rpm, but not actually install it. You can use yum to do this very easily. First, install the yum-downloadonly package:
yum install yum-downloadonly
Then, issue the install command with the –downloadonly flag at the end:
yum install
For example, to download the rpm for apache:
yum install httpd --downloadonly
If you already have the package installed, but just want the rpm, you may need to use reinstall instead of install. Once the command is complete, the rpm(s) will be place in /var/cache/yum/rhel
/var/cache/yum/rhel-
For example, for 64-bit Redhat 5, they will be placed here:
/var/cache/yum/rhel-x86_64-server-5/packages
Flash Updates
The last time I blogged here was in August, and it’s long past due for an update. I’m just going to do a quick flash update on what’s been going on recently in my life.
My Other Blog
I started another blog in January this year. It’s call Ben Runs Life. It is a health and fitness blog dedicated to helping folks who are behind a computer all day at work stay fit and healthy. I started doing the Body For Life program in January and am currently blogging about my experience as I go through Body For Life. I’m doing weekly weigh-ins and pictures of my progress as I go. Check out the before and after pictures of others who have done Body For Life. It will make you want to do it – for real.
My Wife’s Blog
Allison’s blog, House of Hepworths, is continuing to grow. She has over 7700 RSS subscribers now! I’m really proud of her and what she’s accomplished. She’s become so busy that she didn’t have time to do everything herself. She asked me to take over the business side of the blog in order to let her focus on providing the awesome content that she does. I went out and officially registered House of Hepworths, LLC. I’m also dealing with all of her sponsors as well and coordinating with companies that want to do advertising on House of Hepworths.
Organization and Balance
This year is the year of organization and balance for me. After 4.5 years consulting and over a year with a startup company, I realized that I was working too much and not having the right balance in my life. I don’t regret consulting or working for a startup one bit. They were excellent for my career and helped me go places I never thought I would be able to go. My kids are 7 and 10 now, and I want to be able to be there more for them over the next 10 years when they really need support, which leads me to my next flash update.
My Job
In an effort to get better balance in my life, I started looking for a different job last year. I realized there were a lot of options in the contracting arena if I was willing to venture into that. I decided I wanted to work 40 hours a week contracting in an effort to get my life in order and restore balance to the force. I had several offers I was considering, and Time Warner Cable was the best one. At the beginning of the year I switched from iControl and am now doing work for Time Warner Cable. I’m still working on the same software that iControl makes – just focusing on making Time Warner successful in deploying it. A press release was issued Jan 9, 2012 that talks about what I’m working on. It’s pretty exciting stuff that I’m working on.
Organization and Balance (part 2)
After realizing I needed better balance in my life and getting a new job, I had some decisions I needed to make. What was I going to do with my extra time in my life?. It would be really easily fill it with TV, video games, etc — but that’s not really what I wanted to do. So since January, I’ve been able to spend a solid 40 hours a week for Time Warner for my job. With the extra time I’ve been able to do some other things in order to get better balance in my life.
- Spend more time with the kids and family
- Hitting the gym 6 times a week for Body for Life has been awesome.
- I’ve enjoyed being more involved in the behind the scenes work for House of Hepworths.
- I also have had time to start a new health and fitness blog at Ben Runs Life.
- In addition to this, I was finally able to sign up to be a volunteer coach for my son’s soccer team. This is something I’ve always wanted to do, but have never had the time to do it. We’ve had two practices so far and their first game is this Saturday. I think I’m really going to enjoy coaching the kids.
Guest Blogging
I did my first every guest blog post over at House of Hepworths. It was a Valentine’s Day post for Allison. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you should go check it out.
That’s all of my flash updates for now – thanks for reading! I’ll be back soon…
One of the things that I noticed right off the bat in Mac OS X Lion is that by default your Library folder is hidden. I’m sure Apple did this to avoid anyone who doesn’t know what they are doing from messing with their application data. I needed access to it so I could copy all of my Firefox settings from one Mac to another.
Here is one way that you can view the Library folder via Finder in Mac OS X Lion.
The user id on this Mac is “allison”. Notice you can’t see the Library folder under allison’s home directory:
Launch Terminal (Finder–>Applications–>Utilities–>Terminal):
Type “open .” and press Enter. Note, if you have used Terminal before, you may have to run the command “cd” first to ensure that you are placed in your home directory since with Lion it places you in the last directory you were in before closing Terminal.
After running “open .” it will pop a new finder window. The Library folder is now visible, but is slightly greyed out since it is hidden:
If you close all of your Finder windows, next time you open Finder the Library folder will not be there anymore. You can find it in your “Recent Folders” in Finder (Finder–>Go–>Recent Folders–>Library):
A new window will open that once again shows your Library folder:
Here is a video I put together showing how to do this:
