safest way to upgrade a production server

[John Almberg]

>
> maybe 6.3 had the drivers for the motherboard?   I had that - I
> purchased a nice shiny newmotherbaord in 2007 but could not use it
> before 7.0R came out as the chips were not supported by 6.x.  I chose
> not to use a CURRENT or RC version of 7, but to just wait.
>

Possibly... the motherboard is an Intel S5000PAL, with dual quad-core  
processors. I think it was pretty cutting edge when they started  
building it, about a year ago. It's still an amazing machine, IMHO.  
Of course, that might be because my life sort of depends on keeping  
it working :-)