Production site is www.pomeroy.us
Development site is dev.pomeroy.us

Assumptions:
– webserver root directory is /var/web
– production node is called prod
– development node is called dev
– WordPress database is called wpdb

Procedure to copy production WordPress instance to the development node:
1. Copy webserver www root dir via a tarball
tar czf prod-20110808.tgz /var/web

2. Dump the WordPress database to a MySQL dmp file:
mysqldump -u$mysqluser -p$mysqlpass wpdb | \
 gzip -c > prod-20110808.dmp.gz

3. Copy these two backup files to the dev node:
scp prod-20110808* user@dev:.

On the development node:
4. Unpack the webserver tarball:
mv /var/web /var/web.previous
cd /
tar xzvf prod-20110808.tgz

5. Drop the WordPress database and restore the new version:
mysql> drop database wpdb;
mysql> create database wpdp;
$ gunzip prod-20110808.dmp.gz
$ mysql -u$mysqluser -p wpdb < prod-20110808.dmp

6. Update the WordPress 'siteurl' and 'home' options to point to the development node:
update wp_options set option_value='http://dev.pomeroy.us' where option_name='siteurl';
update wp_options set option_value='http://dev.pomeroy.us' where option_name='home';

Should be all done!