[wp-hackers] Production site with localized mirror

[William P. Davis]

We'd like to set up a local mirror of our WordPress site that the staff can
use to post content quicker without the overhead of the production
webservers and to prevent against outages, since the website feeds the print
edition of our newspaper. This is the setup we were thinking:
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1VJSBJViRfeeKeq0H5D8kPVlquna29akmrxINBzhxbqQ/edit?hl=en_US.
Basically, all writes from the local install would of course be synced back
up to the master db on our production servers, and most reads on the local
install would come from the local slave, except in instances when the delay
between the master and slave would be too noticeable (such as on
wp-admin/post.php).

There are a few potential problems that I'd like to clear up to make sure we
don't screw anything up too bad:
* Can we define the local install as internal.bangordailynews.com using the
WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME constants without affecting anything on the
production side?
* Can we also safely turn of multisite in the wp-config on the internal
server without affecting anything production side?
* We are planning on running memcached on the local server and using
W3TotalCache locally, as we do on our production site, to ensure the db
doesn't fill up with transients, for example. Are there any concerns doing
this?

Is there anything else I'm missing?

Thanks in advance for the help.