UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hello,
We are trying to find a easy way to upgrade our old suse 8 boxes to Suse 9. I have discovered the the DD command that looks to be a way to restore a image from Suse 9 to a box at our other locations.

Question, could I use the DD command to restore a image I backed up from a Suse 9 box onto a Suse 8 box. Both systems will have the same exact harddrive and partition information. And for my testing purposes can I also go the other way. So if I successfully put the suse 9 image on my test suse 8 box, and I restore the suse 8 image back.
Also on the restore from tape would I just do

Code:

gzip -dc /dev/ht0/image.gz | of=/dev/hd0

assuming my tape is ht0 and my partition is hd0.

Only issues I see is that I would need to somehow backup the system network, printer settings and such which maybe a problem with this method and restore them afterwards. Trying to find a method that will have the least involvement possible at the remote locations.

Thanks for any help on this...

The best way to approach this imho is to have a pre-installation script that grabs the configuration information required to support the remote site, an installation image push, which provides for the upgrade to suSE 9, and then a post-install which configures the remote host correctly in relation to the new installation based on the legacy configuration.