Okay, I've searched and tried and somehow I'm just not seeing the solution, I installed RAR via apt-get, tried to download the package and manually install it, nothing is working, always the same error:

*rar: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory*

I'm not an advanced Debian-User, so maybe I just don't get it - if you could give me a short step-by-step solution, I would appreciate it very much.

Thank you in advance, this drives me crazy :-(

Don't have an answer, but 3.1 is mighty old. 5.0 is about to be released Sarge (3.1) programs have all been moved to archive servers.

I understand, well the thing is - I'm afraid if I upgrade to Debian 4 or even 5 I will loose functionality of the server and then have an incredible hard time to get it back running - or is there a fail-safe way to upgrade? If so, I would jump around like a kid, I just don't think it's gonna be that easy, isn't it?

So if somebody knows a solution, I would be very thankful (or a way to get to Debian 4 / 5 without problems.....)

Thanks for all!

Debian tries to make the upgrade from stable to stable painless.

It makes no guarantees when you skip a few.

Best bet is to clone you system and try to updated it in a test environment (that's a good idea in any case if you are running production servers.)

see that's what I mean, problems are most likely...

that's why I would rather go for a solution to my problem above and not playing around with a new system - any idea?

You could try to compile rar and see if that fixes anything.

Did you install unrar-nonfree? In versions before Lenny you explicitely had to specify non-free. In Lenny it is the other way around now. I guess it goed the same for rar (but that was somewhat harder to find in apt-cache)

Last week I upgraded a system which was running Sarge from the time that Sarge was testing, and it was not up-to-date. That is, after installing Sarge/Testing I never upgraded.

I upgraded the kernel first, using 2.6.24-etchnhalf, then the full dist-upgrade to Etch. There is a snag here, the upgrade process does run LILO regardless whether you are booting with grub. Since you did not update lilo.conf, the system might not boot correctly in the new kernel. This happens again during dist-upgrading. If you prefer grub, install grub, create and edit menu.lst (!!) and remove Lilo.

I am running Apache, MySQL, PHP, Bind, DHCP, NIS, NFS, Samba, FTP, Postfix, Dovecot, Fetchmail, Procmail, OpenVPN and IPtables on that box, and there were NO problems. Except one, I said the portmapper should only be bound on localhost. That was a clear error of mine and took 2 hours to resolve. Had I not been that stupid, upgrade would have been flawless.

I would advise to make a backup just in case, but chances are the upgrade is just going fine. My downtime was limited to booting two times, one after installing the kernel, and the second one as a test to see the server would boot correctly after the dist-upgrade. (and the portmap thingy of course, but you are not as stupid as I am)

jlinkels