Warm standby with 8.1

Hello,

I'm working on a warm standby system, and we would like to stick with
the RHEL5 distributed version of postgres, which is still 8.1.

I can setup the system to a point where it's adequate for disaster
recovery, but I'm not comfortable keeping the systems in sync for
failover, maintenance, or testing. I'm familiar with the newer
versions, and most documentation for this doesn't mention 8.1 any
more.

Could someone confirm if this is what I need to do on 8.1?
- Create backup, and send to standby server.
- Ship WALs with archive_command
- When we need to switch over; shutdown, sync pg_xlog, and do a
recovery on the new server.

If I have to sync pg_xlog and recover anyway to get the latest
transactions, should I forgo shipping the WAL archives? Switching
between servers should be rare, but I want something that admins
without postgres experience can handle.

Should I resort to slony?
Use the latest version from the postgres yum repo, and vet it locally?

Thanks
-jim