Creating a custom environment

First, I do consider myself still a noob with Ruby/Rails (Rails 2.0).

My question has to do with creating a custom environment; rails
provides the development/test/production environments, but the shop
I’m working at has the standard of naming environments based on the
deployment box. From the little I’ve been able to find on the subject,
creating a custom environment can be as little as copying the nearest
environment file that is like what you want. So, I merrily copied the
test environment to “host1.rb”, and the production file to
“host2.rb”. I then have the startup scripts for our app set the
RAILS_ENV appropriately.

This gets me half-way there. The correct environment files are loaded,
and everything runs, but … apparently a number of settings depend
upon the default environment naming. For example, logging within the
application is still set to the default for development; micro-
benchmarking of rendered items is still turned on … etc. Despite
having the environment file essentially identical to production.rb
(okay, it really is identical), a number of config settings for
production.rb are not picked up when host2.rb is used.

What do I need to do in order to create my own environment that really
does act like the default Rails production environment? Will I have to
dig up all the various config settings and set them manually within my
environment file?

Thanks!

john