On 4/27/10 9:53 AM, "Brian Mathis" <brian.mathis at gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 11:29 AM, Gary Greene > <ggreene at minervanetworks.com> wrote: >>> -----Original Message----- >>> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On >>> Behalf Of Brian Mathis >>> Sent: Monday, April 26, 2010 7:06 PM >>> To: CentOS mailing list >>> Subject: Re: [CentOS] vmware-server-console not installed > [...] >>> >>> You don't need to downgrade for the whole OS, you can just do it for >>> VMware. See the procedure in the first comment in this bug >>> http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=3884. I have done that and it >>> works fine. Just remember that if you update vmware, the edits to >>> vmware-hostd will be undone, so you need to redo them. >> >> I'm not "downgrading the whole OS" only GLibC, Timezone, and NSCD packages. >> Once I did that, the latest version of VMWare Server loads just fine. > > > Seeing as glibc is one of the most used and most critical libraries in > the system, downgrading to an older version of it most certainly has > the effect of downgrading almost every package on the system. > > I'm not talking about whatever OS version (5.3, 5.4, etc...) you think > you're running (that not a real thing anyway as packages all exist at > different versions). If there's an update to glibc that's security > related, by downgrading the system-wide version you're reintroducing > the problem to all packages on the system. This is why it's better to > isolate the downgraded library to just VMware until it gets fixed to > use the updated > > The version number of any package or OS is arbitrary -- you need to > understand the effect of what you're doing beyond the version number. > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos Please don't quote to me the "full effect" mantra you're going on about here, I don't need treated as though I'm some fresh college kid that only started using Linux. I've been doing Linux systems level programming and distribution development for a VERY long time, and have a fairly extensive knowledge about what _can_ and _cannot_ break a box with regards to downgrading core libraries. The particular packages I rolled back to are the last set of packages for 5.3. The vulnerabilities that were fixed in GLibC for 5.4 were not too damaging as they require _local_ access anyway, and since NO VM host should ever be internet accessible (I did not say that the guest OS cannot be, only the host), this should be fine for now. Based off the other emails in this thread, it is worrying to me that VMWare decided to drop the VMWare Server product. However, from a resources perspective, I can understand as ESXi shares much more code with current products than VMWare Server did. -- Gary L. Greene, Jr. IT Operations Minerva Networks, Inc. Cell: (650) 704-6633 Phone: (408) 240-1239