Staging environments are the perfect excuse to dig into new server configurations, and to play around with tools like Deprec. I have covered the gruesome technical details of the process over at Andre on Tech:

• Low-cost Rails-worthy VPS options – I summarize the cost for 256MB -1GB VPS from five different providers. I also outline their backup policies and options for a pre-fab Rails stack.
• Installing nginx/mongrel/etc using deprec (2review) on Ubuntu 7 – all the cool kids are swapping out memory-hungry Apache installs with nginx these days. My next step is to swap Mongrel out for Thin, but I just didn’t get that far.

Overall, I’m impressed with how much deprec does for you. I had my staging environment setup in a few hours. Enjoy!