At Sun, 8 Aug 2010 12:11:35 -0400 (EDT) CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
more a terminology usage question than anything else, but in a couple of weeks, i'll be teaching the first of a few sessions on RHEL admin and, unsurprisingly, i'll be using centos (as i've done in the past).
when i asked the organizer to identify the specific version of RHEL that was being used at the client site, i was told 5.3 so i can easily install 5.3 on the classroom machines, but i'm curious about something and i'll have my contact look into it: if people *initially* install 5.3, is it standard behaviour to still regularly upgrade as new releases come out?
Depends. Most people do update as new updates come out. Doing 'yum update' regularly will update to newer point releases automagically. Some people (for various reasons) don't regularly update their systems.
Look in /etc/issue
obviously, i have to ask my contact to verify what the client has been doing all this time but, in general, what's the normal behaviour for people running centos/rhel? and is there a way to examine an install to see how updated it's been since that original installation?
i just don't want to teach off of 5.3, only to find out later that they've been keeping up to date and 5.5 would have been a more appropriate choice. thanks for any tips.
On a certain level there really isn't much difference from a general admin POV -- it does not really make sense to go into a certain level of detail (like specific version numbers). Basic functionallity is not going to change from point version to point version.
rday