Debian Update Advice?

The machine for ideastream.com runs Debian 3.1. It came with some stuff already installed, such as sendmail, apache2, all based on debian stable. I found I needed to upgrade apache2 to get the correct mod_perl version for my application, so had to install from testing. So I have a mixed system.

I'm at the 'Read-the-Howto' stage, not at the guru stage. I followed Carla Schroeder and made a config setting so I could install some stuff from testing like:

apt-get -t testing install somepackage

My question has to do with how to update the server for security updates and that sort of thing. I'm not going to chance a distro upgrade, but need to keep up with the security stuff at least. I should set it up as a cron job.

How do I do that for a mixed system?

/dennis

OK, two more questions, then ;-)

Here's my current sources.list:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org stable/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org testing/updates main contrib non-free

There is no mention any particular version, but these lines do have stable/updates and testing/updates, so I *think* that should work, no?

And in apt.conf:
APT::Default-Release "stable";

So that 'apt-get install blah' gets stuff from stable, while 'apt-get -t testing install blah' gets testing stuff.

My question is, what command/commands do I issue to gently update the system?

Thanks much,

/dennis

Thanks for the info, Michael, I will proceed.

/dennis