What we had was a mod_ssl installed from RPM (not from yum) by the box-owner, who then hired us to figure out why it didn't work.
Sounds about right. You might also consider hunting for conflicting software installed via source build as well. The two have a tendency to go together...
Here's what I did, in order, to fix the problem, once I figured out that we had a version mismatch:
<snip> rpm -e mod_ssl yum update cd /etc cp yum.conf yum.conf.orig cp yum.conf.rpmnew yum.conf yum install mod_ssl yum update </snip>
and all is now good.
I didn't know about the macros. Thanks! I don't have an .rpmmacros file; I presume I can just add it with the contents from above?
Yep.
What do you have in your repo sections for centos?
We don't have a repo section in our /etc/yum.config file. Should we?
Yeah, you have to, or yum would fail. the repo section can be in /etc/yum.conf, or for newer yums in /etc/yum.repos.d. Basically it's the section with the [repo-id] name=foo baseurl=somepath, etc. Sometimes when people have trouble updating it's because they're either not using the updates repository, they've hardcoded something that doesn't exist anymore, or something is otherwise fouled up. Good work in fixing it.
-- Jim Perrin System Architect - UIT Ft Gordon & US Army Signal Center