I have inherited administration of a dedicated server running CentOS 5.2. It is serving three live websites, among other services. I need to update PHP from 5.2.x to 5.3 on this server.

"No problem!" I thought, "I'll just fire up yum and see what is what."

PHP is not in the package management system. It is in the yum exclusion list, which I overrode but still have no reference to PHP at all in any operation coming back from yum. Yet PHP is working on the system. Installed in some manual process, I assume.

Now I am in fear of breaking things since wandering in the filesystem without package management to guide me is outside of my comfort zone.

Am I right to be in fear? Do you have a good reference on how I could proceed? How would you proceed?

Alan