Standard Edition Physical Standby

Does anybody have any good examples of how to create a physical standby database on Standard Edition? We're planning on rsynching the archive logs to the standby server and running a script to manually apply the logs on the standby database (which is mounted in standby mode). I'm also looking for some good examples/strategies to monitor whether the standby database could theoretically be successfully opened without actually opening the database. Thanks.

Stuart

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l