Howto {easily} revert or downgrade when things go wrong ?

[James Wilkinson]

David Timms wrote:
> What is the best way to cause yum/rpm to downgrade or revert to
> earlier package versions, when I find that things have stopped
> operating properly ?
> 
> Eg. FC3, yum update at some point openldap-server broke {but where?}.
> Is there an option /plugin/ util to:
> 1. revert to all package version as they were installed at a date.
> 2. revert a problem package {and it's dependencies} to what they were on a 
> certain date.
> 3. revert to previous version of a package {and it's deps} (ie not
> have to know / guess the date).

 * Find an earlier version of the RPM in question. This may be on your
   install media, or may be in /var/cache/yum/$repo/packages, where
   $repo is the appropriate name of the repository.

 * rpm -Fvh --oldpackage $package
   where $package would be something like openldap-2.3.19-4.i386.rpm 

You may have compatibility problems with other packages (e.g. the
openldap clients may expect the "right" version of the server). With any
luck, rpm will know about this and refuse to install the older version,
saying something like "openldap-client requires version >2.4 of
openldap"

In this case, you will have to find a version of openldap-client, too,
and put it on the *same* rpm command line (i.e.
rpm -Fvh --oldpackage $package1 package2 package3 ...)

Hope this helps,

James.

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