Hi,

I (blindly) updated PHP to 5.3 without checking changelogs and newly deprecated features - causing a few sites on my Plesk managed CentOS box to behave slightly strange.

I'm looking for some advice on the best and cleanest way to downgrade to 5.2.


I have tried:

With the allowdowngrade plugin for Yum, but it gives errors:


I'd rather not "tinker" with this - as it is a live system and hope that someone can offer advice on the correct way to do it?



Thanks

Apologies, I eventually found a similar thread on the forum.

http://www.atomicorp.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4902

After reading between the lines, I eventually downgraded by performing the following steps:

1. Go to the ART repository for your system (mine was: http://www6.atomicorp.com/channels/atomic/centos/5/x86_64/RPMS/)
2. Download the version of PHP you want to install into a new directory on the server using wget
3. Run the command
   Code:
   rpm --oldpackage -Uvh php*
   (which gave me some dependency errors)
4. Download all the packages that the errors list from the ART repository, in my case:
   
   • php-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
   • php-cli-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
   • php-common-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
   • php-devel-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
   • php-gd-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
   • php-imap-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
   • php-mbstring-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
   • php-mysql-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
   • php-pdo-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
   • php-xml-5.2.17-1.el5.art.x86_64.rpm
5. Keep running the command
   Code:
   rpm --oldpackage -Uvh php*
   , until it accepts it and reverts back with success
6. Restart Apache with
   Code:
   /sbin/service httpd restart
7. Check your PHP version with
   Code:
   php -v
   
   
   • Mine is now:
     Code:
     PHP 5.2.17 (cli) (built: Jan  7 2011 10:39:29)
     Copyright (c) 1997-2010 The PHP Group
     
8. Set yum to ignore PHP updates by editing /etc/yum.conf and including the line:
   Code:
   exclude=php*

Hope that helps someone!

I cannot thank you enough for these clear instructions. I have been working on this for almost 24 hours straight and your post finally got me up and running again.

I did things slightly differently to get it to actually work, but your steps helped me to get there.



at the end, under Transaction Summary, I took note of everything it said would need to be removed because of dependencies and used wget to grab those packages. Eventually your transaction summary should say to remove 0 packages and reinstall 0 packages, and downgrade several packages, for me it was

php
php-cli
php-common
php-devel
php-gd
php-imap
php-mbstring
php-mysql
php-pdo
php-pgsql
php-xml

At this point I said yes to the downgrade and it went through and did its thing. Then apache stopped working and I was getting PHP Fatal errors regarding the ioncube loader, the zendguard loader, and loading zend optimizer more than once.

I had to go into the php.d and I commented out everything in

ioncube.ini
zend.ini
zendguard.ini

I then copied the original contents of ioncube.ini and copied that line to load before zend in your etc/php.ini file



finally I started apache up with success and everything seems to be in order so far

Please know that PHP 5.2 is no longer supported and there won't be any PHP 5.2.x (security) updates.

I am trying to do the same thing. I upgraded mysql and php to latest version, then realized zend guard loader will not load my files encoded for zend optimizer. I tried "yum downgrade php*" two times and it did downgrade my php, but it also made apache stop running and I could not start it until I upgraded back to newer php version.

whats with the shameless spam posting for ged?