Well, this morning for whatever reason I just thought to throw caution to the wind and upgrade my Sarge box (an old Dell GX150) to Etch (Debian stable). Now this is a dumb idea, that’s my primary shell server and allows me to get into my network, tunnel http traffic and generally do my thing from where-ever I am.
Yes, I’m upgrading an OS from roughly 50 miles away via SSH. I cannot get back in if this machine goes down. I still decided to do it. I’m a complete Ass.
Anyway, I’m typing this as it goes. So all of my reactions will be right here 
I first updated my /etc/apt/sources.list file to reflect the stable repos and ran apt-get update. I did a quick search for the latest kernel and installed it linux-image-686. This went “ok”. There was a problem and I needed to run apt-get -f install to fix it. Doing so took care of the problem. I reviewed the grub menu list and saw that the new kernel was the default at boot.
Pleased, I ran apt-get dist-upgrade. I took a quick look at what would be removed, installed and upgraded and let it go…
After a while I needed to choose some options for debconf. I chose to use “Dialog” to display debconf questions and ignored questions with a priority less than “medium”.
I was asked if I wanted adduser to create sytem-wide readable home dirs. I opted no on this one (doesn’t matter on this machine, but it does increase security/privacy).
I was warned that the x-server package may not be installed during an upgrade, and to check for it following the process. This is cool as this machine doesn’t have X installed anyway.
I was warned that ProFTPd may need some help following the upgrade due to some changes in how it’s compiled and configured. I noted this and moved on.
Portmap needed to know if it should be bound to loopback, I opted for no on this one.
There were a few other program specific questions that I needed to answer, not really worth noting here. I just accepted the defaults.
After maybe some minutes I was returned to a prompt and ran shutdown -r now and got…
albus:~# shutdown -r now
Broadcast message from root@albus (pts/1) (Thu Aug 23 10:50:11 2007):
The system is going down for reboot NOW!
albus:~# Connection to localhost closed by remote host.
and then…
10:51:27 up 0 min, 1 user, load average: 0.81, 0.23, 0.08
albus:~# uname -r
2.6.18-5-686
NICE!
That’s all folks, in no time at all (20 minutes?) and from another state away, I upgraded from Sarge to Etch. Linux freaking RULES.
I’ll check on ProFTPd later on and make sure all of my services are running normally, but all in all, this would have to be considered a success.
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