CentOS 5.3

With Red Hat Enterprise 5.3 released I figured it was time to talk about CentOS 5.3 which is an almost identical copy to RHEL.  As always Hawk Host runs the latest and greatest so CentOS 5.3 will be showing up on our servers once it’s available.  For the most part like any upgrade it’s seamless no one notices as package updates don’t mean any reboots or down time.  This is one thing worth noting though and that’s a new kernel!  So within the next month there are going to be maintenance notices for every machine to have a 5-10 minute down time in order to reboot the machine.  So that’s means users making tickets during the reboots as they fail to keep up with maintenance notices.  Even if we sent emails about this sort of maintenance notice we’d have complaints that this is unacceptable or they do not want maintenance notices at all.  Those are the few that do read them as most do not after our experience with the reseller name server IP change where a large amount of resellers did not bother to change IP’s until their sites went down.

Well here’s some information about the RHEL 5.3 release although more technical than anything I figure worth posting:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 GA Announcement: https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhelv5-list/2009-January/msg00092.html

Kernel (2.6.18-128.el5) changelog: http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2009-0225.html

Release notes: http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Release_Notes/index.html

Press release: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2009/rhel_5_3.html