Centos – How to downgrade openssl

If you've simply over-written the rpm-provided files you may have... some pain later on; at the very least it's misleading for anyone who looks at the system.

In your position I'd do one of two things:

1/ Download the srpm for Centos, do an rpm -i openssl-whatever.srpm

Edit the /usr/src/redhat/SPEC/openssl.spec file to update the version and source file to the version of openssl you want to build.

Do an rpmbuild -ba /usr/src/redhat/SPEC/openssl.spec to build a newer version of the RPM. If all goes well you'll end up with some shiny new RPMs in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/$arch and you can just drop them in.

or

2/ Nab the openssl srpm from a newer release (such as Fedora 12), and do an rpmbuild --rebuild openssl-whatever.srpm

Again, all going well you'll get some RPMs, although this is probably less reliable (in the sense that the ABI and dependencies may have changed from RHEL 5 to Fedora 12, for example).

As a worst-case scenario, you could always just compile your own version of openssl as an RPM for your system, and then rpm -ihv.

EDIT: Starting with the source file (.tar.gz), here's what you want to do:

1) Create a new directory to house the RPM hierarchy.

# mkdir -p myopenssl/BUILD myopenssl/RPMS myopenssl/SOURCES myopenssl/SPECS myopenssl/SRPMS

2) Go into the SOURCES directory, and download your source openssl.tar.gz

# cd myopenssl/SOURCES
# mv openssl.tar.gz myopenssl/SOURCES/

3) Create a spec file that provides the necessary metadata (you will need to verify all the values are correct)

--- spec ----
%define _topdir     /home/user/myopenssl
%define name            openssl
%define release     0
%define version     x.x
%define buildroot %{_topdir}/%{name}-%{version}-root

BuildRoot:  %{buildroot}
Summary:        openssl
License:        GPL
Name:           %{name}
Version:        %{version}
Release:        %{release}
Source:         %{name}-%{version}.tar.gz
Prefix:         /usr
Group:          Development/Tools

%description
Special build of openssl for centos.

%prep
%setup -q

%build
./configure
make

%install
make install prefix=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr

%files
%defattr(-,root,root)
/usr/local/bin/openssl

%doc %attr(0444,root,root) /usr/local/share/man/man1/openssl.1

4) After you have a spec file, use the rpmbuild command to build your RPM

# rpmbuild -v -bb --clean myopenssl/SPECS/openssl.spec

5) Your RPM is built at this point... use the following command to look at the contents:

# rpm -Vp RPMS/i386/myopenssl.i386.rpm

6) To install it, run the following as root:

# rpm -ihv myopenssl.i386.rpm

Hope this helps!