Remote upgrade of ubuntu

I had a Ubuntu 8.04.4 (LTS) machine languishing in the basement serving various things. To make it more useful I wanted to upgrade it.

It has no CD-ROM and besides it's in the basement so I wanted to upgrade it over network. I had the hardest time with update-manager, it didn't want to do the job over SSH.

Google to the rescue: http://www.kbrandt.com/2008/11/upgrade-ubuntu-remotely.html - So I got the right iso image and away I went.

Unfortunately there were some circular dependency problems going directly from 8.04.4 to 9.10 so unfortunately I had to edit sources.list and dist-upgrade my way through 8.10 to 9.04 and then use the described method to upgrade to 9.10. In any case it was quite simple, I seem to be modifying fewer and fewer config files as time pass. It might be wisdom, or just old age.