This is more or less a self-note, but I think it can be useful to others also.
If you have any DELL server running Linux, chances are you installed the Open Manage Server Administrator tool - OMSA in short. This tool traditionally came via the DELL Linux Repository but, from version 8.x onward, it had to be fetched from the new DELL System Update repository.
So far, so good - if you need a recent version of the OMSA tool, simply use the new repository. Problem is that its latest release seems not so well tested on DELL's Gen11 servers (which, by the way, should be fully supported). For example, while the 16.02.00 release (February 2016) worked fine, the latest 16.03.00 update (March 2016) was completely broken on my PowerEdge R615: the dsm service segfaulted on startup, with in turn make the other utilities (eg: omreport and omcontrol) completely useless. Maybe updating hardware firmware will solve that, but a segfault is never a good thing to see.
OK, no problem - I can simply issue a yum downgrade of the affected packets and all should get back to work. Not so simple: it seems that the various DSU OMSA versions have different repositories, so a yum downgrade simply can't work without first configuring (and enabling) the older repositories. And now we have a problem: how can I get the older repositories? The DSU main page does not mention them, but fortunately the older DELL Linux Repository has reference to them. From here, we can manually construct a valid yum repo with the specific OMSA version we need, or even run the automatic bootstrap.cgi file which will create the correct yum repo file.
In short, to revert to a previous OMSA release:
- remove the older packages with yum remove srvadmin*
- remove the current yum repo file with rm /etc/yum.repos.d/dell-system-update.repo
- subscribe to the required channel running wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/<version>/bootstrap.cgi | bash, where <version> is the specific version you need. For example, to subscribe to the 16.02.00 release, issue wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/DSU_16.02.00/bootstrap.cgi | bash
- reinstall the required srvadmin packages
This is not rocket science; after all, the install instruction are covered in the very same DSU web pages. However, as a simple Google search tend to directly point to the latest DSU repository, I think this post can be useful to anybody in search for an older, specific release.
Have a good day!