I'm running headless bitcoind on the Electrum server foundry ( http://foundry.electrum.org ) without problems. It all works as expected. It's nice to see some proper timestamps in the debug.log now.

One thing I noticed:
2013-12-09 14:22:59 Bitcoin version v0.8.6.0-g03a7d67-beta ()

-beta is probably not intended for a production release?