Debian 8

You will be upgraded.

Debian 7 to Debian 8 upgrades

Process followed was basically the same on both Bellman and Vastra2.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

"The main things you'll want to back up are the contents of /etc, /var/lib/dpkg, /var/lib/apt/extended_states and the output of dpkg --get-selections "*" (the quotes are important). If you use aptitude to manage packages on your system, you will also want to back up /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates."

BACKUPS=/green/backups/debian7

mkdir -p $BACKUPS
cd /
tar cvzf $BACKUPS/etc.tar.gz etc
cd /var/lib
tar cvzf $BACKUPS/var_lib_dpkg.tar.gz dpkg
tar cvzf $BACKUPS/var_lib_extended_stats.tar.gz extended_stats
cd $BACKUPS
dpkg --get-selections "*" > dpkg-get-selections

Record the rest of the upgrade session.

cd
script -t 2>~/upgrade-8.time -a ~/upgrade-8.script

Per the notes to set locales with "dpkg-reconfigure locales", I set the default locale for en-US.UTF-8

Gotchas

They changed the Apache2 conf.d folder name to conf-available. This means anything you added to conf.d won't be found. Move everything in conf.d to conf-available and remove conf.d Reload Apache. Voila!