Lenny will be the next stable release after Debian Etch. It has today still the status unstable, but worked for me without any issues in a virtual machine on my mac. Hence, I decided today to move my servers on Lenny. Upgrade on a 1&1 AMD Rootserver is quite easy.

Juste replace in your /etc/apt/sources.list all ‘etch’ statements with ‘lenny’.

then type the following:

aptitude update
aptitude dist-upgrade
aptitude upgrade
aptitude update
aptitude upgrade

Upgrade worked for my without any major issues within a couple of minutes. However mySQL will not start properly and Apache2 will reset your may-be redirect commands (e.g. AllowOverride All to AllowOverride None in apache2.conf or httpd.conf). Please correct the Apache2 conf files and restart your server with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart.

As for the mySQL Error, the error message is self-explaining:

/etc/init.d/mysql:ERROR: Using expire_logs_days without log_bin crashes

Just go to your /etc/myqsl/my.conf file. The parameter ‘expire_logs_days’ requires now the ‘log_bin’ parameter be turned on. Open the file and turn ‘log_bin’ on (e.g, removing the ‘#’ character infront of it).

Afterwards you only need to restart your mysql server with /etc/initd./mysql restart, and you whole rootserver should now run smoothly on Debian Lenny.