Can yum override an exclusion in the /etc/yum.conf directory
 

I had to add exclude=kernel* xen* to /etc/yum.conf for several of my virtual machines to prevent kernel and xen upgrades from breaking apache 1. Is there a way im yum to override the exclusions? ie yum -force update?

Recent versions of yum have the --disableexcludes=[all|main|repoid] option. The argument of the option is all if you want disable all the excludes defined in yum.conf, main or repoid if you want to disable the excludes in the main or in a repository section respectively. This is still a very poor documented option since it has been included in very recent releases. If you don't have it, you can either try to install the latest release of yum or just comment out the exclude option in /etc/yum.conf every time you need it.

So that would be;
`yum –disableexcludes=all update`
or
`yum –disableexcludes=all update kernel`
or you can do it as;
`yum --exclude=package* update`.

Error in the above, should be two dashes, not one:

`yum --disableexcludes=all update`
or
`yum --disableexcludes=all update kernel`