Experiences with (very) rare Linux crashing, upgrades

“One of the really nice things I love about Linux is that it can
be upgraded from version to version of most mainstream
distributions. This means that ideally, a system can be kept up to
date over time while preserving settings.

“I’ve heard of so-so luck in the real world with upgrades from
version to version. Personally though, I’ve had pretty good luck
mainly with upgrading Fedora from version to version. I love the
fact that the binaries are upgraded, while maintaining config
files, settings, user data, etc.

“Recently, I had a very rare case where a CentOS 5.4 server was
crashing. Some binaries started to show segmentation faults
(started with yum, then logrotate, and certwatch), then eventually
the server would run for a few days, then the kernel would simply
crash dump (similar to the common blue screen of death that we are
all too familiar with in Windows).”

Complete Story