[CentOS] Hot upgrade from 5.2 Centos to 5.7 Centos

Wed Oct 19 01:15:35 UTC 2011
Barry Brimer <lists at brimer.org>

>> Hello Group,
>>
>> I am installed some application running on top of Centos 5.2 OS and these
>> applications are running fine.  However, we are thinking of upgrading our
>> 5.2 Centos to 5.7 (hot upgrade).  That is we want to upgrade from 5.2 Centos
>> to 5.7 Centos and not disturb the applications.
>>
>> Is it possible?  Could someone please help.
>
> It is rare for a 'yum update' to disturb already working applications.
> It is possible of course, but the point of 'enterprise' distributions
> is that a lot of care is taken to not break things (i.e. make changes
> that aren't backwards compatible) within a major release version.
>
> Not sure if it is necessary but there were some quirks in the updates
> along the way that might make it a good idea to:
>
> yum update glibc\* rpm\* yum\* python\*
> before doing a full 'yum update'.

I might suggest a yum clean all before the above command.  I've seen a 5.0 
yum update to a 5.6 without issue, but there was very little on the 
server.