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[Erik Molenaar]

Hi all,

Shortly we will be replacing some vital components in our network. This will mean that we have an outage of about two hours. Our border switches will remain as they are, and also our BGP connection to the internet. I would like to sink all http requests from the internet to a sorry page hosted on a server connected to the border switches. Has anyone done this? I suppose some kind of default route towards a server connected to the border switch will do? Any suggestions kindly appreciated.

Best regards,

Erik

[Philip D'Ath]

Personally, I like using Amazon AWS Route 53 and Amazon AWS S3 for this.

S3 lets you host a static "site down" page.  Route 53 is their DNS service.  You can define a health check (aka, port 80 up ...), and if so if gives out the normal IP address for your system.  You then define a failover IP address which is the S3 static web site (sorry down right now, back soon).

This way everything is automatic.

Otherwise a simple fix is on your border switches (assuming they are layer 3)  is to create a new layer 3 interface that is a /30.  Make the temporary web server the same as the main production web site IP address, and obvisouly the other IP address goes on the switch.  Being a directly connected interface it wont do anything normally if it is unplugged.  When you are ready to do your changes just plug in the temporary web server and being a directly connected interface it will take precedence over any other routing you have setup.