Centos – “yum upgrade” to a specific CentOS version

centossystem-installationyum

I'm using a third party proprietary application on CentOS 5.4, which is known to malfunction on pristine 5.9 or later. I would like to incrementally upgrade to the latest CentOS version where that application works. Since yum update brings me to 5.9 right away, that's not an option. I thought of burning all four Install-DVDs 5.5 through 5.8 and installing each to find out the hard way where the breakage sets in, but maybe there's an easier way frobbing the /etc/yum.conf.d files to go from 5.4 to 5.5 etc. Can anyone provide some guidance?

(Sadly, it is not an option to ask the vendor of that application for a fix, since it was acquired by a big blue company and terminated a little while after that.)

Edit:

Further investigation revealed it is an incompatibility in the GNU C library. With glibc-2.5-58 the app runs fine on CentOS 5.9, with stock glibc-2.5-107 it hangs. I now point LD_LIBRARY_PATH at the older glibc when running the app.

Best Answer

I think you could treat the first CentOS installation DVD as a repository, i.e. loop-mount a DVD iso image as /media/cdrom, set the baseurl of one repository to file:///media/cdrom and tell yum to ignore the other repos. Create a /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Media.repo containing these lines:

[c5-media]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Media
baseurl=file:///media/cdrom/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

and tell yum to use this repo only:

yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=c5-media install lynx

(See this for reference.)

Caveat 1: This will fail if RPMs from DVD 2of2 are needed; not sure if there's a workaround. Caveat 2: It's a bit of a waste of bandwidth, though, since you need the whole DVD just to update a few packages from the specific version. HTTPFS, if it works as advertised, could be of great benefit here (I've never tried it).

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