Here’s a cool tip for webmasters who’s trying to figure out issues after updating or installing packages in Fedora, CentOS or Red Hat Linux systems. Basically any Linux system that uses the yum package manager may be able to use this.

This tip allows you to view a list of all changed and updated packages since the last yum update. It is a handy tip especially after installing or updating packages your system becomes unstable and unresponsive.

Here’s why I wrong this. Few days ago, I updated my Linux server via Yum and after just few hours my system became very unstable. It would freeze up and stop accepting requests from web clients every few minutes. It then came to me that the the issue started right after updating my machine. So decided to go back and view all packages that were changed or updated after running Yum.

It turns out that one of the packages that were updated was the culprit. It had a wicked bug that was draining my system’s memory. This is known as memory leak.

I ran the yum history command, found the bad package and removed it. Soon after that, my system was stable again.

So if you find yourself in similar situation, follow the steps below to resolve.

With the terminal open, run the commands below to view all Yum updates by date and time.

yum history

 

yum_history_linux

 

The above command lists changes to your system by Yum package manager. It shows the login user who ran the command, the date and time and the action taken. This just show a summary of what happened.

To view a detail report on the date the change happens, you run the commands below. The number represents the ID in the above list.

yum history info 62

 

yum_history_linux_1

 

Now you can see the more information of the packages that were installed or updated and from which repository. All you need to do now is downgrade the package and you’re done.

yum downgrade package_name

 

Or run the commands below to remove the package.

yum erase package_name

 

Enjoy!