Debian Etch has been serving me well for a few years with wonderfully easy and infrequent maintenance.
However it's at the end of its life
http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100121
So I've upgraded to Lenny following these instructions
http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en....
It was remarkably painless
One small problem with the mail system.
Errors were encountered while processing:
exim4-config
imapproxy
exim4-base
exim4-daemon-light
courier-imap
at
bsd-mailx
courier-imap-ssl
mailx