[vox-tech] How safe is this upgrade?

[Nick Schmalenberger]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 03:44:00PM -0700, Rod Roark wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> An associate of mine has this Debian server in a hosting facility
> that's been running for about two years, and would like to do a
> dist-upgrade.  Does anyone see any reason that this might screw things
> up?  I'm a bit concerned about the large number of changes that will
> be applied.
> 
> Below are some things that I see when preparing to upgrade.  TIA for
> any comments.
> 
> Rod
> 
> ======================================================================
> 
I just upgraded a sarge system to etch, and after updateing the package
lists, instead of dist-upgrading all at once I upgraded a few packages
at a time over several days. I did dist-upgrade to get the packages
that needed to be upgraded then apt-get installing a few of them. That
way it was easier to pay close attention to merging and rearranging
local changes to the apache config files and such. Upgrading postgresql
from 7.4 to 8.1 turned out to be extremely easy because they can both be
installed at the same time listening to different ports and the debian
tool pg_upgradecluster made the conversion completely painless and took
less than 5 minutes. I think the apache upgrade was the most trouble,
but that was mostly because I didn't put my local changes in
/etc/apache2/conf.d/ which I have done now and upgrades to apache2 wont
mess with it.
Nick