Okay, I can now do an upgrade of my player in just under two minutes, not including the final reboot and rebuild of the player database.

Cool.

I've got a few things left to clean up before I unleash this:

-- kill the player before doing the upgrade
-- reboot the machine afterwards
-- force a database rebuild (just delete the database files, I guess)

But apart from that, it's working reasonably well.

As a short-cut, it calls "gunzip" (for the root partition data, which comes gzip'd in the upgrade file), and "ncftpput" to do the FTP transfers for me. Anyone who thinks they may want to run this sometime soon should hunt down the "ncftpput" program while they're waiting for me. It is part of the "ncftp" program suite, for which source code is available for most unices. I happen to be using version 3.1.5 on my machine.

Once it's all nicely working, I might build the FTP client stuff into the program, but for now I'm sticking with the lazy approach.

Cheers