On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Matt Shields wrote: > Depending on the traffic level and the amount of hardware, I would > recommend against what you just said. Especially if your current > environment is multiple servers that are load balanced. You don't > want to have to replicate the environment just to have a construction > page. > > Instead of setting up Apache with PHP, just setup a really basic > server with lighttpd and a single static page with really minimum > graphics. It will serve pages and the one or two graphics a lot > faster and a single server can usually handle the load. > > -matt > > On 8/24/07, Barry Brimer <lists at brimer.org> wrote: >> >> >> On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Matt Arnilo S. Baluyos (Mailing Lists) wrote: >> >>> Hello everyone, >>> >>> Although we use CentOS primarily on our servers, this query is >>> actually more of a general networking question than something specific >>> to CentOS. >>> >>> In the next week or so, we shall be migrating our in-house servers to >>> a data center. While we're doing that, we'd like to show a "Site down >>> for maintenance" message while the servers that hosts our websites (we >>> have around 15 sites hosted btw), are down. >>> >>> So, how is this accomplished? While I can probably hack something on >>> our name servers, I'm sure there are people on this list that have >>> been doing this and could give some recommendations as to the best >>> practices for this type of task. >> >> I would have DNS for all domains point to a web server that has the >> following php page: >> ========================================================================= >> <html> >> <head> >> <title>Maintenance</title> >> </head> >> <body bgcolor=white> >> <font size=5><center>Maintenance</center> >> <br> >> <center>The server that hosts <? $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] ?> is currently >> undergoing maintenance. <? $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] ?> will return to full >> service as soon as possible. >> </center> >> </body> >> </html> >> ========================================================================= >> I would also add to your httpd.conf file: >> ========================================================================= >> RewriteEngine on >> RewriteRule !^/index\.php$ /index.php [NC,L] >> RewriteRule !^/index\.php$ - [F] >> ========================================================================= >> This makes it so that anyone who connects to any URL on any of your >> websites will be told that the server they are connecting to is under >> maintenance. >> >> When you have the new server up and running, change DNS. Alternately you >> could place this on a server in the new location, but change the >> routing/NATing to temporarily deliver the addresses to the server hosting >> this page. If you are using SSL certificates, you will need to have them >> as well and create different virtualhosts, although they can all have the >> same DocumentRoot and web page. >> >> Hope this helps. >> >> Barry My page does not use any graphics. The reason I used PHP and not a static page was that I wanted the user to know that the site and url they had connected to was valid, and that they had not reached the page by mistake, or mis-typed the address. If you are that worried about loading a page faster, and you think lighttpd is the way to go, I am all for it, but I don't think it is necessary. For added performance, you could put the page on a ram disk, but I really think the return will be minimal. Barry