VmWare Bug glibc 2.5-42

Currently there is a bug in the CentOS 5.4 glibc 2.5-42 packages. The problem is that vmWare guests will power off. It has been found that glibc is the cuase of this problem in CentOS 5.4. The fix is to either downgrade the glibc packages to 2.5-34 or not to upgrade to CentOS 5.4

If you have already upgraded to CentOS 5.4 then following the following instructions to downgrade glibc 2.5-34 and to stop it from upgrading.

cp /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo ~
mv /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS53-Base.repo

You now need to edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS53-Base.repo and do a replace all instances of $releasever with 5.3
You also need to change [base] to [base53]

As a precaution run the following commands

yum clean all
yum makecache

Now try the downgrade.

yum downgrade glibc glibc-common

Now stop the glibc libraries from updating by editing /etc/yum.conf and adding the following line

exclude=glibc glibc-common glibc-devel glibc-headers nscd

We can now configure CentOS-Base back to its default so we can upgrade other components.

rm -f /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS53-Base.repo
mv ~/CentOS-Base.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/
yum clean all
yum makecache