Upgrading to Debian Etch

[parigi]

Hello,

I'm glad I have found your forum. I'm already learning a lot merely by browsing the existing threads but haven't found an answer to my concern.

I have ordered a French Root I server a couple of days ago. I was disappointed when I found out that I could only switch to a Debian 3.1 Linux distribution instead of the desired Debian 4.0 Etch.

I did install it however ("reinitialisation" in French) and I attempted five upgrade trials to no avail. I'm just unable to ping or reach the server again after the reboot (shutdown -r now).

I'm also unable to login through the Serial Console because I keep getting a "ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host" error. I wonder however how I'm even able to get a regular ssh session to my Root I server in the first place. I do have a regular ssh session with my server.

I'm following the "Upgrades from previous releases" steps from http://www.debian.org/releases/stabl...rading.en.html
which takes me to the final reboot step without any error. I avoided the kernel upgrade which seems to be a custom one set by 1&1. I also avoided the mdadm (RAID) upgrade because I have no clue about how to set it. Looking elsewhere on several posts this upgrade is supposed to be as simple as changing /etc/apt/sources.list to point to etch followed by "aptitude update && aptitude upgrade && aptitude dist-upgrade" which did not work for me anyway.

The help desk told me they had no clue either but that, to their knowledge, many of their French clients have upgraded to Etch successfully.

I'd be grateful if one of those who have upgraded to Etch could help me with the steps I may have missed in my upgrade. Any help with how to set up my Serial Console to shortcut this missing reverse DNS would also be appreciated.

I'm sorry for the long post. English is not my first language and, well, I maybe unclear or even rude without noticing it.

Thanks in advance.