Questions about HA for RTC

I'm currently setting up RTC in a WAS envrionment with a primary service and a backup service. Each environment has it's own physical boxes with WAS installed, it's own IIS server which will direct traffic to the respective WAS server, and each environment will point to the same db, which is replicated to another db if the primary db fails.

At our site, only one service will be up at a time, and we will be using radware to redirect traffic from one site to the other, i.e., we don't have to mess around with the WAS plugin or IIS.

I've read the following article on configuring RTC for HA:

http://jazz.net/library/article/207/

Our set up is not exactly the same, but there are 2 points in the doc I wanted clarification on:

1. There is mention of turning off security on the Primary server by modifying the web.xml. What does this actually mean, and is this necessary in our environment?

2. Disable asynchronous tasks on the backup server. This one we will do, on the off chance someone accidentally brings up both sites, but can someone explain:

- what these asynchronous tasks are?

- how long could we/should we run the backup site with asynchronous tasks disabled. If the primary was down for a while, should this be enabled, and at what point after the backup is up should we do this?