After 600 days of smooth operations and with the release of Debian 4.0, an upgrade to Debian etch was due, though we could have stayed on oldstable for a few more month. The upgrade on all three machines went with what can only be called minor glitches. So after a couple of days of normal operations, it’s safe to say we are on Debian _stable_ again.

etch includes major upgrades to XEN and mySQL along with dozens of other essential upgrades. It’s really great how well the upgrade path works with Debian and we are one happy customer because of such reason. We’ve tried SuSE and Gentoo before, but for servers I’d not want to miss Debian anymore (SuSE and Gentoo are great distros too). For a server security, stability, reliability and maintainability is far more important than being bleeding edge.
For example another machine of mine has started with Debian potato a couple of years back and went through upgrades from woody to sarge to etch without a reinstall.
Yikes, what has been planned as a status report turned out to be a love letter to Debian.