On Mar 31, 2009, at 7:57 PM, Gilbert Sebenste <sebenste at 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