One of the things I was petrefied of with the old UFies server was rebooting. The long delay as the scsi started up, various BIOS screens popped up and asked for attention, what if the updates I’d done over the last 2 years since the last time the box was rebooted had some unintended effect that wasn’t noticable until the new kernel was in. It wasn’t so much that I was worried that it wasn’t fixable, I’ve been doing this stuff for long enough that anything is fixable, it was the fact that the server is physically an hour and a half drive from me, and if whatever needed to be done needed more than a reboot and hitting ‘y’ to a fsck prompt, it was a crappy trip out.
So something I was interesting in doing with the old ufies box when I had the new one in (and the new one is in and has minimal if any actual issues with the install come up) was to do an update and see what happened. I was actually pretty impressed. I rebuilt all packages, updated everything, set up the latest kernel (vs the 2.6.4 kernel that it was running), and rebooted. No issues coming up. Nice to know I was extra paranoid for nothing 🙂