Ran up2date -u tonight for the first time in a while...suddenly realized mysql was down.

Went to restart the mysql server and it didn't exist. The database files were there but all of the mysql 4.0 binaries were gone.

Why would an update wipe out mysql?

Thats not normal at all. Generally when there are any sorts of conflicts it simply errors and stops.

Yeh, quite odd...what was truly odd was that it went and tossed in some mysql-3.23 which I discovered when I tried to reinstall 4.x again.

All's well right now, but that was truly bizarre.

Which OS version are you running, are you running a control panel, and are you usually using up2date to update mysql?

When running a control panel I have mysql, httpd, etc. in the package skip list or yum exclude list and use the panel to update these to the latest versions supported by the control panel which may or may not be the versions the OS

If you are running RHEL3, it will have likely added MySQL as a dependency and distributed the 3.23 version that RedHat provides, overriding any installation that you had done manually. The best way to prevent this is to go into the up2date --configure and add it to the pkgskiplist.

Our planet server is running 2.4.21-53.EL.

When I configure pkgskiplist, do I just add 'mysql' without the quotes?

I would put 'mysql*' into the list. This will prevent mysql-server and mysql (client) from being overwritten.