Debian 3.1 reverting to old files every 15 minutes

[anjinsolutions]

I have am administering a server running Debian 3.1 that is reverting to files that are two years old and this is happening every 15 minutes or so. That is critical files in directories such as /etc , /var & /home are displaying files from 2009 and then 15 minutes later, the latest files from 2011 are listed.

I have never seen such behavior and I wanted to know how best to trouble shoot this.

Thanks.

[cynwulf]

No idea what's causing that...

Debian Sarge is now an unsupported release, so your server should not be considered secure. You should upgrade it to at least the supported oldstable release (Lenny 5) or to the latest stable release (Squeeze 6).

(Doro5thy67 is a spammer - already reported)

[anjinsolutions]

The issue was resolved - had something to do with the hosting provider's backup configuration.

As for upgrading the Debian version, can I upgrade directly to Debian 5?

[cynwulf]

Do you have direct, physical access to the server? If yes, then yes you probably can upgrade, if not then it would not be a good idea to try an upgrade through that many versions. As to a direct upgrade from Debian 3.1 to Debian 5 - I would say no.

The best method in my opinion, is to set up your sources to track the archive.debian.org repos, run an upgrade and then set your sources to track debian 4 (etch) then dist-upgrade to that. Once it's fully upgraded you'll need to change the sources once again to track the official oldstable repos and dist-upgrade again - when that's done you'll be running lenny. If you try to leap-frog a release, you will most likely run into some serious problems.

If you intend to try this you will need to read the release notes (in particular the section on upgrading) for both etch and lenny. As ever: back up your data, if you lose all of your data and break your system you get to keep both pieces, etc, etc, etc.