[CentOS] Package updates for 5.4?

[Kevin Krieser]

On Jan 26, 2011, at 8:08 PM, John R Pierce wrote:

> On 01/26/11 5:51 PM, Mitch Patenaude wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Gene <brandtg at bellsouth.net 
>> <mailto:brandtg at bellsouth.net>> wrote:
>> 
>>    Can you tell us more about you cluster? Nodes? Purpose? I managed
>>    a small 90 node cluster for seismic work.
>> 
>> 
>> 300+ nodes total, 200 in a hadoop cluster used for mapreduce, the rest 
>> in a variety of headless datacenter roles (web, mail, database, 
>> backup, etc.).  They are somewhat sensitive to version updates, so I 
>> was hoping to find a way to find the security updates (patch level) 
>> without having to change versions.  Upgrading to 5.6 would likely 
>> involve upgrading several core packages (mysql, ruby, python, bind, 
>> even glibc and the kernel). Is this a pipe dream?
>> 
> 
> assuming the mysql, ruby, python, bind you are running are all the stock 
> RHEL5/CentOS5 ones, the updates maintain the same x.y version as 
> whatever was released with 5.0, the upstream vendor backports security 
> fixes.   the kernel is still 2.6.18, glibc is still 2.5, etc etc.
> 
> 5.6 is not a new version, its just a snapshot of updates at that point 
> in time.   the version is 5.

But still test, sometimes something can break.  In point releases in the past, some things have broke like, recently, an ethernet card wouldn't work after the update.  Gave weird errors.  Replaced it with a newer revision of the card, and it worked fine.  But generally things work fine.