G'day All,

I have a couple of production machines running Debian 7.11. One of those
has a twin I use for staging and I routinely rsync the prod box across
to ensure I'm testing in as accurate a replica as I can get.

Upgrade time is coming, and I'm migrating to Devuan Jessie.

This environment is a bit of a bitza with home-made backports of things
like e2fsprogs, mdadm and plenty of supporting libraries plus custom
grub configs, kernels and the usual gumph that is the result of a dist
upgrade from Squeeze, and as-required piecemeal patchwork to keep things
stable over the last 6 years or so.

I'm happy to say the staging box went through a relatively seamless
upgrade with no apparent fallout. Nice. Better still, I can lose all the
custom compiled stuff and go back to a standard install.

I'll be re-doing the upgrade a few times to ensure I catch all the
little config file niggles that will need tweaking, but I was fairly
blown away with how easy it was, given my experience "upgrading" to
Debian Jessie during the late testing phase often resulted in wreckage
and an unbootable box.

I've been used to Debian upgrades being seamless over the last 20 years
or so, and they have been until the wreck that was Jessie, so it's nice
to go back to a stable base that won't move stuff around under me,
re-name all my network adapters and just fail to boot far enough into a
system to allow me to recover when I do something dumb.

Two thumbs up to the faceless volunteers that make all this machinery
happen.

Regards,
Brad