- This is a pretty good start, though a bit outdated: http://www.underhanded.org/papers/debian-conversion/remotedeb.html. Note that base-config is no longer used, so refer to the official release notes for setting up a system after running debootstrap: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apds03.html.en
- Debian's initrd does not like labels that have weird characters, like /s. Make sure to either use actual device names, or relabel your partitions with tune2fs so they don't have slashes in them.
- IPMI helps for remote management, make sure to set up GRUB with serial console