On Mar 31, 2009, at 7:57 PM, Gilbert Sebenste <sebenste@weather.admin.niu.edu
wrote:
On Tue, 31 Mar 2009, Lanny Marcus wrote:
You don't need to change anything. 'yum update' will update things, within a given major release (eg 4.x or 5.x). It will happen automagically. Going from 4.x to 5.x requires using the installer (eg the ISOs and a reboot with the installer CD/DVD). I don't know if it is possible (or advisable) to do a major release update with yum.
Maybe possible, but usually/always strongly discouraged, by upstream and the CentOS team, to upgrade from one major release to another. Best to BACKUP and install fresh.
I agree. I was with Redhat starting with 6, and left after Fedora 9 got too restrictive with things. I have done upgrades, and it wasn't pretty, between major releases. Going from CentOS 5.2 to 5.3 is most worthy of doing a backup, no matter what.
The caution about first updating glibc (?) is important. I recall from the update to 5.2, there is a difference, between "yum upgrade" and "yum update". I believe "yum upgrade" is a better way to go from 5.2 to 5.3. *BACKUP*, read the Release Notes and then you are ready to roll. Probably the standard CentOS Repos that you have from the original install will do it.
OK, sounds good. Thanks, everyone!
Just to clarify for others reading this, going from 5.2 to 5.3 (or any point release) is NOT considered a major upgrade (unlike going from 4 to 5 which is), so doing a backup, clean install and restore is NOT the recommended procedure.
Just perform a straight yum upgrade.
You should be backing up your personal/business data anyways, but an extra one right before any upgrade is good practice. Don't bother with the standard system executables, just the data and configs.
-Ross