Edgy -> Hardy Upgrade, suggestions?

[James Cummings]

Hiya,

I need to upgrade a server machine which has sat stable (and protected
behind a firewall) using Edgy Eft.  I want to upgrade it to Hardy
Heron and am wondering the 'best' way to go about it.  What I'm
particularly concerned about is this is a VMWare virtual machine,
halfway around the world from me, so I don't want to get into a
situation where it has rebooted or killed my ssh session
unnecessarily.

1) It doesn't seem to want to do any updates any more.. are edgy
repositories now no more?  I wanted to install 'screen' as a
potentially useful tool prior to the upgrade. How does this affect
upgrading?
2) Is there a way to skip steps and move directly to hardy or
something, or do I have to do each upgrade of edgy  -> feisty -> gutsy
->hardy
3) Should I just negotiate with the people there to have someone wipe
the VM and start again with a fresh Hardy install? Rather than try an
in-place upgrade?  While this is possible it is politically
frustrating (the VM is donated to a not-for-profit academic
organisation).
4) Anything else you can think of that I should be concerned with?
(Obviously the machine contents will be backed up before upgrade.)

Thanks for any suggestions.

-James