Hello,

I have a Debian machine with an outdated 2.4.27-2-386 kernel and tried several times to update it to 2.6. I tried apt-get, using old .config, using completely new config, some packages and many howtos.
It never worked and I have no idea why. The problem is, that this is a server in some data center and I can only access it via SSH. So whenever a kernel update fails I have no idea why cause I can't see the error.

Might be a stupid question but is there a possibilty to install/compile/update a kernel that definitely gonna work?
I did it successfully a couple of times on other machines but I have no idea what's wrong with this machine...

Any help highly appreciated!

If the machine is doing its job then why change it? There is nothing wrong with using a 2.4 kernel. Open Wall Linux still uses a 2.4 kernel. Don't change it unless you have a demonstrated need to do so. I'm not even sure that a 2.6 kernel will run on a 386 machine.

Some data center? So you can't put your hands on the machine! And you want to upgrade the kernel! Bad idea.

There is probably nothing wrong with the machine. The process is flawed. Leave it alone or travel to the data center so that you can power cycle the machine and do other emergency recovery stuff when the whole thing breaks.

If you MUST change the software then do this:
1) Make a backup of the system that can be used to restore onto bare metal. A Partimage backup will do nicely.

2) Create a new partition.

3) Install the new version of Linux into the new partition.

This method will allow you to keep the old system available in case you have to roll back to it when the new version doesn't work. Belt and suspenders.

First of all thanks for your reply.

Well, I'd need to do some software updates (e.g. MySQL 5) and it only runs on >2.4 kernels.

I know it's a bad idea but I don't really have a choice. But there's some company that can reboot and boot the old kernel just in case (that's what happened when I tried to upgrade before).

Can't really go there cause it's kinda far so I guess the best solution would be to get another server and move the stuff onto the new one and then try to install a newer kernel with a newer version of Debian.

I've never been a fan of large kernel (only) jumps.
Build a new level/release with the kernel you need - that way you get the tool-chain at the comparative level.

You mean I should compile a couple of kernels in order to not make a big jump?