Steve Blinkhorn wrote:
And if I had booted a new kernel first, I would have been unable to log in remotely because of PAM, so I wouldn't have been able to run etcupdate, a fortiori. That's precisely the sort of gotcha I want to avoid. See what I mean?
Hmm, it's been a long time since I upgraded to 3.0, but is that really the case? It doesn't seem like the kernel would have anything to do with PAM. I've always done upgrades by installing the new kernel first (and only the kernel) and booting that, then installing the userland binaries. IIRC, the only time there were some issues with that was when scheduler activations were removed from the kernel, and pthread-using binaries didn't work, but that didn't prevent me from installing new binaries.