two questions regarding warm-standby on 8.4

Hello.

I am configuring warm-standby as documented here:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/warm-standby.html

I am using "pg_standby", & may have it working corrrectly, but am not sure.

1)  The standby database never 'starts', right? (/etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 start" times out; I can't connect to the db to see if tables are correct).

2)  Because of #1, I suppose I can't do a pg_dump on the standby db?

Thanks.
Gx