Re: Question: Why do you dist-upgrade?

[Tim Kelley <tim.kelley.nola@gmail.com>]

So a client comes to you as a professional admin.  Let's say they have
an aging Squeeze LTS based web server.  They want to move to Jessie
which you may have heard is recently released.  Would you re-install
their system to Jessie and ask them to reinstall their web site from
scratch?  Or would you spend twenty minutes upgrading from Squeeze 6
to Wheezy 7 and then from Wheezy 7 to Jessie 8?

​I would recommend they stop hosting their own machine and use a hosted service if they do not have a full time admin, actually. I generally haven't done work like that (freelancing or working for an integrator), but this isn't 2005 any more, either. Are there really that many companies - companies without their own IT department - with self hosted, unmanaged servers running around these days?​ Seriously?

And really, running a server on bare metal these days is a total waste. Any hypervisor will make remote work a lot easier, and avoid the whole issue with ssh and rebooting and everything else. Sheesh, it's 2015, ya'll.

Sorry for the top posting.