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Re: Switching from Etch to Lenny - help me assess the risk.



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Ramasubramanian Ramesh wrote:
> All,
> 
>  I run Etch+backports at my home gateway/file server. Lately, I find
> that many packages are too old in Etch for my needs. 

Which packages are too old for a 'gateway/file server?

>                                                       I am thinking of
> switching to Lenny. While Lenny is not as stable as Etch, I am not sure
> how much difference there is, in terms of stability. 

Lenny gets several packages updated on a typical day. Sometimes this
requires to restart services or even X, kernel updates require a reboot,
but don't happen prohibitively more often than for etch.

> I am not worried
> about a couple of packages breaking here and there  and X not firing up
> occasionally. I am only worried about complete breakdown like down time
> on this server. So here are my quesitons
> 
> Does Lenny breakdown occasionally completely? I mean you cannot boot
> after apt-get update.

I've been using testing since sarge and that has never happened to me.

> Will it cause major data corruption due to its instability?

Never happened to me (nhtm).

> Will it have broken kernel?

nhtm

> Will my NAT and  firewall completely fail?

nhtm

> Will my samba+cifs+nfs service breakdown or cause data corruption?

nhtm

> Finally, if I decide to switch, do I do a apt-get dist-upgrade or just
> apt-get upgrade. What is the difference?

- From [1]:

> * If you are running stable (aka "Etch"), you could consider
>   upgrading to "Lenny" and see, if everything works fine. Currently there
>   are no detailed release notes documenting the procedure, so you best
>   way to test upgrades are to:
> 
>   1. Make backups
>   2. Change your /etc/apt/sources.list
>   3. Run aptitude update to get information about new packages
>   4. Run aptitude install dpkg aptitude apt to install the newest package
>      management
>   5. Run aptitude full-upgrade
> 
>   If something goes wrong / something unexpected happens, please report
>   it. If you already know a specific package, report a bug against that
>   package. If you don't know, please report a bug describing the problem
>   you experienced to the upgrade-reports package. If your problem is
>   something, which can't be fixed properly, but should be documented
>   (e.g. hardware support regressions, packages no longer available)
>   please report a bug against the release-notes package (Bonus points if
>   you not only report the bug, but also supply a paragraph to be added to
>   the release notes).

A few days ago it worked essentially flawlessly for my workstation [2].

> Regards
> Ramesh

Greetings, good luck!

Johannes

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/10/msg00000.html

[2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=504592

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