Upgrading to Minecraft server 1.7.8

First time for everything: since I set up my Minecraft server on version 1.7.4, I've had to upgrade.  Guess a lot of changes were made partly because of the Heartbleed bug and the fact that Mojang is making some changes for the username changes that will be implemented soon.  Thus it jumped from 1.7.6-7-8 pretty quickly!

There wasn't much as far as instructions to be found, so here's a short list of what I had to do to get things running again.

1. Stopped the running version 1.7.4 server
2. Renamed the ops.txt file to ops.txt.bak
3. Renamed the user files in <minecraft root folder>/world/players from playername.dat to playername.dat.bak
4. Downloaded the newest .jar file for the Minecraft server using wget into the root folder (normally I'd link to that file, but that changes often)
5. Ran the script to start up the server using a new screen
6. Wait for the conversions to take place, then first thing from the server console op my username (otherwise, nobody has op status

Probably to be expected, once I connected to the server, I lost any inventory that I had previously.  Also noted, from other users that posted info about the upgrade, you will need to re-do any white-list you had created previously.

The ops file and white-list now are .json files that contain both the usernames and their new UUID.  Otherwise, things looked pretty much back to normal.

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4/14/2104

Addendum: Doing some more research, it looks like the user files should have upgraded automatically when server 1.7.8 was started for the first time.  I saw an error message stating that the conversion failed (and the server stopped).  That's why I renamed the user files and started over.

At the same time, there were reports that some of the Mojang services were having issues, including the service that would have done the conversion.

Conclusion, step 3 might not have been completely necessary.  User's inventory might have been preserved in the upgrade process, but I haven't seen anyone else post anything about that.