I recently had the need to downgrade the version of samba that comes with RHEL6.4 64-bit, I had authentication issues within our domain environment with the newer versions, older versions of samba seem to work fine, so I needed to downgrade samba:

From
samba_x86_64-3.6.9-151.el6_4.1 to samba-3.5.6-86.el6_1.4

The first thing I tried was the yum downgrade option, but the yum plugin yum-allowdowngrade is not in the RHEL repos, never mind I’ll just erase them and start over, so

Stop samba

[root@foo samba]# service smb stop
[root@foo samba]# service winbind stop

Erase it (this also removes windbind)

[root@foo samba]# yum erase samba

Now I need to see if the repos have an older version

[root@foo samba]#yum --showduplicates list samba

This displayed several previous versions, the version I wanted was samba.x86_64-3.5.6-86.el6_1.4, so I try

[root@foo samba]# yum install samba.x86_64 3.5.6-86.el6_1.4

…and it doesn’t work, the fix is to drop architecture part “.x86_64“, and then it works

[root@foo samba]# yum install samba-3.5.6-86.el6_1.4

Okay, this is great, now I have it installed I want it to stay at this version, so we can use “yum-versionlock”

Download/install it

[root@foo samba]# yum install yum-versionlock

And now version lock samba

[root@foo samba]# yum versionlock samba

All is going great…or so I think, I now realize that I need a matching version of winbind for this older version of samba, so do

[root@foo samba]# yum --showduplicates list samba-winbind.x86_64

So lets install it

[root@foo samba]# yum install samba-winbind-3.5.6-86.el6_1.4

And lets version lock it this as well

[root@foo samba]# yum versionlock samba-winbind.x86_64

That’s it your done.

As a side note, the downgrade fixed the problem immediately, I even used the same smb.conf file I was using with the latest (and seemingly not so great) samba-3.6.9-151.el6_4.1, along with pam.conf, krb5.conf, I have 5 other servers that had the exact same issue, and even a couple of Solaris 10 servers, so I’m fairly certain it is a bug/issue within samba, if I have time I may file a bug report to RedHat.