[CentOS] 'yum update' rollback or .. ?

Fri Jun 22 11:58:33 UTC 2012
Nikolaos Milas <nmilas at noa.gr>

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-from-within-a-new-host-without-boot-td2251272.html).

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