Should I Upgrade 5.4 -> 6.2?

[alex at schnarff.com]

First off, I want to thank the people who responded to my thread 
"Stability Issues on a 5.4-RELEASE box" a couple of weeks ago; after 
disabling hyperthreading, getting a clean run of Memtest back, and 
doing some serious fsck'ing of the disks, the box appears to now be 
completely stable. I'm still not sure which of the above fixed the 
problem...but I'll take a stable system at this point. :-)

That said, in that thread I had asked about the advisability of 
upgrading to 6.2, and it was intelligently pointed out that doing so in 
pursuit of stability was a bad idea. Now that the box is stable, 
though, I'm back to the same question: should I make the upgrade, and 
if so, how should I do it?

My primary driver for doing so would be to keep current enough that I'm 
still getting security and other patches on a regular basis, and that I 
can upgrade my applications from ports as necessary. If this is not an 
issue, then my only remaining concern would be that it's usually easier 
to get support on lists like this if you're running a modern version of 
the OS (that's certainly the case with the OpenBSD folks).

My primary concern with upgrading is that the box is in Portland, OR, 
and I'm in Arlington, VA...and while the ISP is friendly, I doubt that 
I could count on them for major system recovery if I botch something 
during the upgrade. My other worry is that I don't want to break 
existing apps if possible (the main one I'm concerned about is 
Zope/Plone). This is a production box with moderate traffic, and it 
would be a problem if there was extensive downtime.

Is it worth upgrading? If so, what's the best way to do so -- CVSup, or 
some other way? Are there any major caveats if I do choose to upgrade 
(or choose to stay with the existing OS)?

Thanks,
Alex Kirk