Hello

Do we have to use "yum update" command every week or we have to wait more?

Does the updates can cause problems? How I have to prevent the problems that the updates can cause?


Thanks

This depends on the distro and repositories you're using. If you stick to stable you should have minimal problems with updates.

You can run updates as often as you want or are able, although it's useful not to leave it too long due to the need to install security updates as soon as possible. Daily updates might be a good strategy, but it is really up to you.

If you're worrying about updates causing problems then make regular system backups/images/snapshots so that you can roll back your system if you need to.

While I agree with the post above; the command below will allow you to check for updates without actually running the "yum update" command, and therefore if there are no updates available, have nothing happen and be returned to the command-line. It will also allow you to see which packages have updates available for them (if any) and it refreshes yum's package cache as well.

I always run the command above before I run the "yum upgrade" command - I know you mentioned the "yum update" command, but personally I find the "yum upgrade" command to be better.

The difference between the two below:

The default configuration for yum frequently contains "obsoletes=1", which makes "update" equivalent to "upgrade". Check your /etc/yum.conf to confirm.

there is nothing installed until you hit the " y " key to tell yum to install

or hit the "n" to tell it NO do not install


also the " update/upgrade" set of commands are for DEBIAN and not redhat

"yum update" and "yum upgrade" ARE valid commands for yum. I used the "yum upgrade" command on my CentOS 7.5 system just yesterday and in addition, the descriptions of the "yum update" and "yum upgrade" commands I copied from yum's help output.

CentOS is basically Red Hat without the branding.

I run an upgrade about once a month. But if you're running a public server, you might want to run it more often.

Distro agnostic question. I run upgrades on my home computers (all Ubuntu) whenever I have a minute. Sometimes I'll run updates every other day, others it could be a month between. Just depends. Public facing server though I'd advise almost daily when security updates are concerned. Have to remember though that the more often you run updates you introduce the potential for more instability. Updates can occasionally be bad, kind of a crapshoot sometimes. Is why many servers out there are still running ancient versions of linux. They are afraid to upgrade because of what they might lose.

<-- Not a sysadmin, just a personal opinion.