On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 20:56 +0000, mick wrote:
Advice please people.
I have two VPSs. One runs Lenny, the other etch. There are sufficient differences between the two for me to want to standardise on lenny. (I also run lenny internally on a couple of NSLU2s).
Upgrading should not be a problem. I have experience of doing exactly that on local machines - but I have never done it from the end of an ssh connection when the machine in question is housed in a remote datacentre (and, moreover, is a virtualised image).
The debian site (at http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.html) recommends against upgrading remotely using telnet, rlogin or rsh, but suggests that ssh will be OK.
Maybe the reason for suggesting ssh is that normally the ssh master/listener process can be killed and re-starting without disconnecting existing sessions.
As you mention it is a virtualised machine this should actually make things easier in two ways if you have some support:
1. A snapshot of the machine can be taken before the start of the process to restore to if it all goes wrong.
2. The equivalent of pressing the "Reset" button can be done from a software control panel rather than making a journey to the physical location of the server.
Of course if you want to rely on either of those things you'd want to know who to call to arrange it.
Regards, Steve.