[CentOS] Re: Support policy CentOS 5

Thu Aug 21 16:33:34 UTC 2008
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists at karan.org>

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 ).

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/  : 2522219 at icq