Upgrade FBSD from 6.1 to 7.2

I rent a dedicated server running FreeBSD 6.1-p16. I can only access it remotely through Webmin and an SSH terminal. How can I upgrade from 6.1 to 7.2 remotely?

Should I use the "Upgrade" feature of systinstall? or does that only update the 6.1 branch? etc.

I have read a lot of documentation however most of it operates under the assumption one has direct access to the hardware. (I dont) I connect remotely. Impacts on network connectivity after an install etc. concern me.

Thanks.

If you have root access you can do a network upgrade.

http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/upgrade/

I'd take a look at his resources to give you an idea. Although his 6 - 7 upgrade docs are for 6.4 - 7. And FreeBSD started using a different update starting with 6.2.

This is one of the reasons we lease our server through Pair Networks. Everything is fully managed. Which is good and bad. They take care of the major stuff, security upgrades, etc. but if there is a problem it can be a bit of a pain having to fill out a support request to do something that I could do in 2 minutes with root access.

alternatively you can use cvsup to the RELENG_7_2 branch

install 'cvsup-without-gui' , and enter the options in /usr/share/examples/cvsup

then cvsup stable-supfile , and read the freebsd manpage for rebuilding world. thats how i always do it. i'm sure there's easier ways, but its always good to know this way if you ever plan on venturing into kernel tuning / optimizations.