Upgrade Experiences (27 Sarges -> Etch, and counting)

[Maarten Verwijs <mverwijs@farwise.org>]

hi,

I took the plunge and upgraded about half of the Lab here to Etch. 
This is about 27 machines to date, catering almost the same amount of
users. 

In totall there are 62 Debian Desktops here. Most of the Sarge-machines
recently upgraded were installed almost 2 years ago. 

All machines are Pentium IV's (2.8 through 3.2 Ghz), with 'round 1GB of
memory. 

A small list of software installed (before upgrade):
 - Gnome
 - KDE
 - XFCE
 - autofs
 - XFree86-4
 - subversion
 - NIS (yp)
 - Firefox
 - XEmacs
 - Emacs
 - Vim
 - Tetex
 - snmp
 - ntp
 - cups
 - openoffice (from backports)
 - Evolution

None of the users have expressed complaints or problems, even after
asking several times. If something was wrong with their XFCE/KDE/GNOME,
they'd let me know. :)

There are 2 things that require me to do some manual labour: 
* Opera. If opera is installed, upgrading from XFree86 to Xorg fails. Xorg
	wants to remove a folder that Opera still has a symlink in. No biggy:
  remove opera prior to upgrading. 
  Luckily for Debian, this is not their problem: it's Opera's.

* Autofs and NIS. We still use NIS (yes we do) and NIS starts _after_
  autofs. This means autofs is not aware of the NIS information.
  Therefor: no /home/*
  This is a known bug, that i can work around using rc.local.

So as far as I'm concerned: Etch is ready to go!

Thanks for all the hard work! Debian is still the one and only
distribution for me. It Just Works. Thanks for your efforts.

If you need more details about the installed Sarge machines that were
upgraded, please let me know.


Kindest regards, 

Maarten



-- 
Maarten Verwijs 
Debian Administrator
Netherlands Institute for Space Research (www.sron.nl)