On 22/6/2012 2:06 μμ, Theo Band wrote:
What is your best practise regarding "rollbacking" 'yum update' on physical servers ?
Assuming that you have problems due to a particular newly-installed package, you can downgrade:
rpm -Uvh --oldpackage package-2.4.0-1.el5.x86_64.rpm
or:
yum downgrade package (if it is in the repo)
Since problems are usually introduced by a particular package (and not by all), this might be enough in most cases.
Note, however, that dependencies are not resolved automatically with the above commands, so they must be handled manually.
Another, more complete solution, of course, would be to have a full system backup (regardless whether the system is physical or virtual) and in case things go wrong, restore from backup (always a bit risky, I know - it makes you feel uneasy). We use mondorescue without problems (see: http://www.mondorescue.org/). I have been able to even use the backup to restore a KVM guest (using LVM) under VMware (you may see http://mondorescue-mailing-list.679749.n3.nabble.com/Mondo-devel-Restore-fro...).
Or - if feasible - you can attempt to virtualize your physical server, either using mondorescue or VMware converter (or other commercial tools) and be ready to use the virtual machine instead.
I am interested on other solutions too, so your thread is interesting!
Nick