| From: David Mason via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | I am interested in this question too. I currently am running on Debian | 7.7 but I’m not sure I can upgrade to a more current version, which is | frustrating because I want to install Java (to run a Minecraft server) | and (when I tried, so while back) I couldn’t get it to install because I | had such an old version of Debian. Back in 2017 March 12 you mentioned a problem "Updating Wheezy to Jessie". Did you try Stewart's and Lennart's suggestions? This is exactly the kind of problem that a debian local users group might address. Recently I suggested that GTALUG could function as a debian LUG. I guess that here we have a test of this idea. | So I was thinking of FreeBSD, but OmniOS looks pretty interesting. I | won’t be doing any upgrade for several months (because as far as I can | see, I need to install a new ZFS system and copy it over. I can’t risk | loosing this system). It would be good to have a backup, anyway. I could | try this on a virtual system, but I don’t know long it would take to | back-up over the network. Even for the debian upgrade attempt it might be good to have a backup. If one falls behind on updates, there is a greater incentive to stand still and fall further behind. A vicious circle. I've had that happen. After enough time, the old hardware becomes obsolete too and it makes total system rebuild more sensible than update. In my most recent example, I jumped about 15 years ahead in hardware.