Best way to upgrade 2.7.1 to 2.8.1

I am getting the following error message when I try to automatically upgrade from 2.7.1 to 2.8.1

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.1.zip
Download failed.: Could not create Temporary file
Installation Failed

How to troubleshoot this? Does some directory not have the correct permissions?

Thanks.

@sam786: See the info under automatic upgrade below.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

@dlmweb: That’s what it sounds like. You may try setting the permissions on wp-content directory to 777 and then set it back to what it was (probably 755) after the upgrade. Also, see the following thread.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/243300?replies=18

I had been using the auto upgrade and auto plugin install features since WP 2.7 on one of my dedicated servers with no problems. Then a couple months ago, I got a new VPS server and set-up some WP installs on it. When I tried to use the auto-upgrade, I ran into the same problem you are experiencing. I did some searching and found a rather detailed explanation of the problem on a blog post somewhere on the Internet…can’t remember where now and can’t seem to find it again.

But, (if I remember correctly) I enabled CGI mode on my VPS to solve the problem. I can’t remember all the details about this problem, but not all server configurations will allow the auto-upgrade script to work. I’m sure the blog post is still there, it’ll just take some hard searching to find it. WP recognizes that this feature will not work with all hosts…see the following:…just not a lot of detail there as to why.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Core_Update_Host_Compatibility