[CentOS] Nightly yum update did an "upgrade"

[Les Mikesell]

Griesbach, Lutz wrote:
> 
> i have a centos (4.?) Box  with nightly yum update enabled. Last night, it did an upgrade to 4.7 leading to several problem i.e. not respawning the dhcrelay, which is needed on this box.
> 
> Can I control the update policy not to upgrade to new releases in the nightly updates? I would like do to nightly updates, but make release upgrades manual (I get a new kernel, so I have to reboot anyway).
> 
> 
> Is that possible? 

No, the updates aren't nicely separated into ones that will break the 
services you happen to need and ones that won't.   On the other hand it 
is pretty rare for a Centos update to break anything, so you might want 
to investigate the actual problem you had.

Want I normally do for critical servers is:
  yum install yum-downloadonly
Then periodically
  yum -y --downloadonly
which can run unattended, be ssh'd to a bunch of machines in a loop, 
etc. since it won't install anything.
Then when you have time to babysit the actual install and reboot if it's 
  a kernel or libc update, do the 'yum -y update' which will go quickly 
since the packages are already downloaded.  Having a similar system to 
test first is always a good idea, but I can't think of anything in years 
where a Centos update actually caused a problem that couldn't be fixed 
quickly if you watched the rpmsave/rpmnew files from the installs.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com