...

I've managed to avoid upgrading a kernel up till now. How

tricky is it on

...

a scale of 1 - 10 for someone slightly above the level of complete incompetence?

If you have some idea of what hardware is in the system (or a .config file hanging aroudn from last time), then it's pretty simple, really. Some people find the kernel-package package in Debian is helpful, but I tend not to use it. I recommend make menuconfig...

After last night, and making a kernel with the IPSec patches in by just typing the right (one) command, I've decided that make-kpkg is lovely. Now all I have to do is switch my firewall box over to Debian. And repair its disk. And ideally find it a monitor which hasn't got 20 second phosphor persistence...

Incidentally, when I've used SysRq I've found it needed enabling with an echo 1 >/proc/sys/kernel/sysrq on boot. Do it. It's invaluable when your machine goes tits up. (Especially when it's a general workhorse machine that everyone uses, with 40G partitions and a strange intermittent kernel bug that makes it impossible to reboot.)