Upgrading the server to Debian 13
The home server has been running Debian since day one, and I like it for the same reason most people do: it stays out of the way. With Debian 13 out for a while and the first point releases done, I finally scheduled the upgrade for a quiet Saturday.
Preparation was the usual routine. Read the release notes, take a ZFS snapshot of the root dataset, make sure the latest backup is fresh, and remove a few packages that I no longer used. I also wrote down the list of running services so I could check them off afterwards.
The upgrade itself was a matter of changing the sources, running apt full-upgrade and answering a handful of questions about configuration files. It took about forty minutes on this hardware. After the reboot everything came up except the network, because the interface name had changed.
Fixing that took five minutes with a local keyboard and monitor, and it was a good reminder to keep those nearby during upgrades. Everything else, including the containers and the monitoring stack, came back without complaint. The snapshot was deleted a week later.