from Centos 5.0 to Centos 5.2

You can upgrade whenever time you feel suits you. Most people upgrade using their package manager (apt, yum, ….).

Your upgrade should be painless, but always read the Release Notes before upgrading.

Use yum upgrade, instead of yum update.

5.3 was released today.

Main gotcha in the upgrade to that is to upgdate glibc first, then update the rest (not everyone is hit, but some people have seen update failures if glibc wasn't updated first).

I updated my two Linodes last night. Following sweh's suggestion I did:

yum update glibc

yum upgrade

and rebooted in the Linode manager. Both came up perfectly.

If you're finding you need to use 'yum upgrade' to upgrade to RHEL/CentOS 5 point releases, you've either taken specific actions to make that necessary, or found some sort of wacky bug.

All 'upgrade' does vs. 'update' is enable obsoletes processing – but since obsoletes processing is turned on by default anyway (see /etc/yum.conf), it has no effect beyond 'update'.

RHEL/CentOS point releases aren't supposed to be special, they're just a set of updated packages grouped under an arbitrary label for human convenience in testing/certification and installation media management.

@sleddog:

I updated my two Linodes last night. Following sweh's suggestion I did:

yum update glibc

yum upgrade

and rebooted in the Linode manager. Both came up perfectly.

I went from 5.2 to 5.3 – did glibc first then just "yum update"

One thing of note, it's best to do updates like this through lish. You don't want a disconnect causing your update to fail in the middle of it.

Or do them inside of screen. That's saved my bacon a number of times.