Today after the excitement of the Tornado, I sat down to upgrade my better half's desktop box from Etch to Lenny. I run testing on my box and all my newly built systems for the past 6 months have been Lenny already, which only leaves my ByteMark server and my partner's PC.

So far it's gone in fairly painlessly, no problems yet. Last time when I did the Sarge to Etch upgrade there were a few oddities around the SSH package but they were easily fixed, so not a serious problem. Except for test systems I've never reinstalled Debian on a box, it always seem to upgrade just fine and keeps running without a problem.

I know that Windows users' and users of some Linux distros reinstall their systems all the time to keep them running. In fact a Windows 2K server at work needs rebuilding because it has "gone bad" - though in fact nothing has been changed other than normal security updates in years - strange that? Sometimes it's good to reinstall, rather than carry over old packages and ideas, it's just a pain to do and something I try avoid most of the time.