I'm hesitant to do a clean upgrade because it takes a long time to get my Empeg back to my "hacker friendly" setup with all the debian tools, user apps, etc. But in the meantime I'll switch to the stock init and see what's up.

If you have the developer version running (which I assume you have, because of the various tools you installed), and with hijack installed, you have two (or even more) options for backing up your installation:

1. log in to you empeg and do a dd if=/dev/hda5 of=/drive0/program-partition.img bs=4096 (jeesh, I always forget wether the program partition is hda5 or hda4). If you want to go back to your installtion, just reverse the if= and of= options.
2. With hijack, you can also log in using ftp (or even http) and download /dev/hda5 to you PC. To go back to your installation, just re-upload it to the empeg after installing hijack again.
3. With the upgradesplitter/upgradebuilder package that is available on my homepage (www.incase.de), you can also create a .upgrade file from the image of hda5 you created before, but you need gzip also to do so. First: gzip the image, then create an appropriate control file (look at the documentation in the upgradesplitter/builder package for details, you only need the pumphda5 related line, but you should also set the comments and information tags) and finally run upgradebuilder on that control file.
   

I hope to find some time during the following weekend to mess with my MkII for a while. If all goes well, a custom .upgrade file will become available that can be installed over the default empeg .upgrades of the 2.0beta series. That custom file will include hijack, boot from hda2 and include empegVNC, telnetd and some other software I think would be useful.

cu,
sven