Recently I ended up in a situation where I had to use an old version of watchdog package from Etch (4.0) on Debian Lenny (5.0) because of a bug in Lenny’s version.

First you need to uninstall the current version  (5.4-10) of  watchdog package:

apt-get purge watchdog

Download the watchdog package from Etch and install it.

# wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/w/watchdog/watchdog_5.2.6-6_i386.deb
# dpkg -i watchdog_5.2.6-6_i386.deb

Now to hold the above installed package giving the following command:

echo watchdog hold | dpkg --set-selections

To confirm if your command worked properly give the following command:

debian:~# dpkg -l | grep watchdog
hi  watchdog   5.2.6-6  software watchdog

The ‘h’ (marked in red) above tells us that the package has been put on old.

If you are using aptitude then you hold the package by:

aptitude hold watchdog

Now let’s way if you want to do an “apt-get upgrade” because Lenny got updated or some new security patches have arrived:

# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
watchdog
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
#

As you can see the watchdog package didn’t got upgraded to 5.4-10 and remained at 5.2.6-6.

To remove the “hold” from package give the following command:

echo watchdog install | dpkg --set-selections

Also don’t forget to rate this post below.

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