I have two CentOS based servers at the office. Both built within a day or so of each other and both with the same set of packages.
As mentioned last week, I have both servers setup to notify me when updates are ready (as opposed to automatically updating themselves). However, I’m not quite sure how much I trust that at the moment.
Last week Wednesday, one of the servers started notifying me that kernel updates were ready to go. I manually ran “yum update” on the other server, and it notified me that phpMyAdmin updates were ready…
Yeah, each server was looking at different updates!
A day later the first saw the phpMyAdmin updates as well, so that’s not too big of a deal – I think they were maybe 12 hours apart for notifications.
However, it took that second server until last night (Sunday) – 4 days later! – to see that kernel upgrade.
Now, both servers are on different networks with different connections to the ‘net, so they’re using different mirrors to check for updates. But shouldn’t the mirrors be a bit more in sync with each other?!?
If these were major security patches I’d be freaking out…
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August 11th, 2008 
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Uhm…remember that mirrors are *not* part of a distro’s infraestructure, unless otherwise noted.
That means that some mirrors do their mirroring every hour, some every day, some every week…and there’s not a thing anybody can do about it
So…check which mirrors give you what and just change mirrors whenever one of your server’s mirror isn’t doing a critical update and you find it somewhere else.
Yes, it’s a PITA, but…free infrastructure is hard to come by
Good point about the mirrors, Vox.
Now for the dumb question: What’s a reasonably straight-forward way to change the mirrors being used? Right now it seems to be relying on a fastest mirrors check of some sort.