Patrick Derwael wrote:
*/[Patrick Derwael] /* The point is that Parallel supports exactly CentOS 4.4 and 5.0, Fedora 4 and 6 and RHEL 4ES and 5ES.
This bit is interesting. I dont know anything about 'Parallel' so keep that in mind.
Most vendors when they say only 1 release and only that specific release is supported do so because they have kernel modules that are built against the kernel shipped in that version. Now when you install CentOS-5.0 you get the kernel that was shipped with 5.0 - when you do the yum updates, that kernel is not removed. The default policy for yum on CentOS is to not 'upgrade' the kernel, but to also install a newer one, if its available. Primary focus of this policy is to address the specific issue you are running up against, and also in cases where people have specific hardware support drivers compiled into the kernel or when they are running custom builds of the kernel.
Now, I dont know what parallel is or what you are doing there, but I dont belive the Vendor that only one update level is supported. Perhaps they have a dependancy on a specific package ( like the kernel ) - those are easy to lock into a version with things like yum-versionlock.
As far as my other systems are concerned, (pen testing) I will reinstall them under Centos 5.2 in the coming weeks
you dont need to reinstall to get from 5.0 to 5.2, if you do a yum update, that will bring in all the updated packages. ( remember 5.0+updates == 5.2 ).