You can use drush to synchronize databases and files directories from production servers to your local development setup. This blog post show an easy way to setup these aliases and adds three new commands to do drush synchronization.

When having development servers that clients needs to access, but you don't what search engines to index one solution is to protect the server with HTTP authorization implemented using PHP. This post while explain how to do just this on an Aegir hosting solution.

When using panels together with views panes, which have exposed filters, it happens that parts of the URI is append in the URI each time you submit the form. This can be fixed by altering the views exposed form action variable.

This post explains how to install the aegir queue runner, so that the tasks will be executed as once.