Upgrading a kernel in a remote server without fears, how

Hi all,

This is a question that probably has appeared a lot of times here but I haven't found a solution.

Yesterday I went to the data center where our servers are hosted. There I tried to upgrade the kernel of one of our servers. It's a Dell Poweredge 1950 running a 2.6.18-6-686-bigmem installed via aptitude, no manual compilation. I installed linux-image-2.6.26-bpo.1-686-bigmem and rebooted it. Afterwards there were no network, drivers problems.

Thanks to I was there I was able to reboot again the server with another kernel version.

And here comes my question, is there a way to ensure that the kernel will work? I don't think so, but how you do this? upgrade a kernel remotely? I have found the grub's fallback option, but I don't think it'd solve my problem as the server started fine, the only problem there were no network.

Cheers!!
--
Arnau


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