[NBLUG/talk] How to undo a yum update

[Dave Sisley]

Hey, everybody:

I've just recently had a rather nasty experience using yum update.  As I 
told Augie offlist, it felt a little like getting some bad clams 
<emoticon with tongue hanging out, looking nauseous>.

I'm running FC4 and had upgraded from FC2 around the beginning of 
September.  I had then run yum update every couple of days or so with no 
trouble until about a week or so ago when my X windows set up went 
crazy.  Anything on the monitor (a Samsung SyncMaster 172N, if it helps) 
was scrambled - both console and X.  I tried tweaking my xorg.conf file, 
and even going back to the one I had (thankfully) saved from my FC2 
config before upgrading.  No luck.

After bangning on it for a few days I convinced myself that it was time 
for a fresh re-install anyway, as my box had gathered some cruft and 
wonky configs over the years.  So I do a complete-from-scratch reinstall 
of FC4.  I experienced some trouble with my linux partition (related?), 
but after reformatting the partition the install went fine.

I did a bunch of googling and found quite a few bugzillas reporting 
trouble of this kind, but not necessarily describing my exact experience.

Then I ran yum update, and after it churned for a while... You can 
guess:  I got the clams again.

So I re-reinstalled, and I'm afraid I will never update this computer again.

To finally cut to my questions:

1. Does anyone know what might be wrong with that xorg update? The 
offending package was xorg-x11.i386 6.8.2-37.FC4.48.1 (or one of the 
other 10 or so associated packages).

2. What's the best way to proceed with yum so that if an update screws 
up like that, I can back out?  I know rpm allows for reinstalling older 
packages, but you usually have to update in a certain way  (the 
--repackage option, I believe), so that the older packages are 
available.  Is it possible (or advisable) to just find the old versions 
of a package on the web and forcibly reinstall the old one(s) over the 
new? Or should I just update everything except for xorg?

I'm curious how other folks handle this kind of thing.

Thanks in advance for any info.

-dave.

-- 
_____________________

Dave Sisley
Roth-Sisley.net
dsisley at sonic.net