How To Upgrade Debian Etch To Lenny

[ Thanks to Falko Timme for this link. ]

"Debian Etch is soon to be unsupported by the Debian team, therefore all Debian Linux Servers need to be upgraded to Debian Lenny. I work for Netzen (an IT Support company) and have upgraded many Linux servers to Debian Lenny over the past month, so I am providing this guide on how to upgrade Debian Etch to Debian Lenny to the HowtoForge community.

"Backup
Backup! I took a full backup of the server which is stored off the server I am backing up of course! I also take an additional backup of /etc which I store locally in /root this is just in case I make a mistake during the the upgrade process and over write a config file, or dpkg / aptitude makes a misstake some how and botches my configs. Worth pointing out that none of these two things have never happened, but “only the paranoid survive”.

"SSH / Screen
When I upgrade my servers remotely over SSH I always run the upgrade in screen, that way if you lose connection to your server you will still be able to reconnect to the screen session."

Complete Story

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