Upgrading Debian Etch to Lenny
On last Saturday Debian 5.0 “Lenny” has been released as stable. This probably means a lot of updating work for many administrators. I was updating a couple of servers during the last days. Due to Debian’s APT system it’s a pretty easy process.
Step 1:
Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list. Replace every occurrence of “etch” (I assume you’re updating from Debian “Etch”) with “lenny”. Your sources.list should now be looking roughly like that:
deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ stable main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib
Step 2:
Simply run apt-get updateand you should probably get something like this:
Get:1 http://ftp.de.debian.org stable Release.gpg [386B]
Hit http://ftp.de.debian.org stable Release
Get:2 http://security.debian.org stable/updates Release.gpg [189B]
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates Release
...
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main Sources
Hit http://security.debian.org stable/updates/contrib Sources
Fetched 2B in 0s (15B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: There is no public key available for the following key IDs:
4D270D06F42584E6
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
Apparently, this means you need to get the public key for 4D270D06F42584E6. 
This can easily be done with the following commands.
gpg: directory `/root/.gnupg' created
gpg: can't open `/gnupg/options.skel': No such file or directory
gpg: keyring `/root/.gnupg/secring.gpg' created
gpg: keyring `/root/.gnupg/pubring.gpg' created
gpg: requesting key F42584E6 from hkp server wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net
gpg: /root/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created
gpg: key F42584E6: public key "Lenny Stable Release Key <debian-release@lists.debian.org>" imported
gpg: no ultimately trusted keys found
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: imported: 1
srv:~# apt-key add /root/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
OK
Please note that the key ID and though the public key needed on your system can differ from this one.
Step 3
Finally, you can rerun the package-list update and run the actual upgrade.
srv:~# apt-get dist-upgrade
Depending on your machine’s capacity and your internet connection speed the upgrade can take from about 15 minutes to some hours. The avarege time my updates took was 30 minutes. After that you can reboot your freshly upgraded system with the new kernel and you’re done.
March 14th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Thank you! Its good to have some kind of brain extension around here
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