System Down notification

ACDC

When I take the server down for maintenance I would like to redirect any users that try to connect to a url maintenance page informing them of the current status

Any ideas on best practice here ?

hpl123

Acdc,
I can think of 4 different ways:

Do the routing inside Aware IM i.e. control for example which VP should be displayed or redirect the user to a particular page with the maintenance info etc.. This has been covered many times in the forum and I even think you have shared info about your solution before in the forums. You need the server and Aware IM up for this to work.
Use a htaccess file that redirects the user to a particular maintenance page BUT htaccess is Apache HTTP and not Apache Tomcat so you need to use Apache HTTP (or some other webserver, I for example use IIS together wth Tomcat) in front of Tomcat/Aware. You need the server to be up (not Aware IM) for this to work.
Use DNS (standard or dynamic) which means you do the redirect on the domain level instead. You don´t need the server or Aware IM to be up. A downside if using standard DNS is the delay before the new DNS settings are applied (up to 90 minutes for each change).
Rename the startup.html page (or is it some other file, not really sure) to something else and then rename your maintenance page to startup.html (I THINK this will work) so when the user goes to the app domain the maintenance page is displayed instead. You could maybe also / instead add some JS to the startup.html page BEFORE the Aware IM stuff checking some variable and then redirecting if needed. You need the server to be up (not sure about Aware IM) for this to work.

There might be more / other approaches

hpl123

Related to this thread, I have seen statuspage.io being used by many larger companies and is a great solution: https://www.statuspage.io/ . We could in theory create some redirect to a statuspage as well and might be better than just having some static info page (look at the features statuspage.io for more info / comparison). This solution could also be used in general i.e. all the time to inform users about stuff like if parts of a system is down etc. etc..

tford

Good summary Henrik.

I have used a combo of Henrik's #1 and #4 ... #1 when just one application is down for maintenance, then #4 when the entire AwareIM server is being updated.

ACDC

Thanks Henrik,

In our case we have to down the server and go offline for an hour or so to let the backup process complete. So this disables the system for routing or presenting maintenance notices

It just dawned on me , If I stop the AIM server javaw.exe process only and leave the Tomcat service running , this will let me serve up a plain html NoticeMessage.html ( I have always been focussed on downing the whole server )

We provide our users with a .html containing an iframe link url e.g. https://ServerName:443/MyApp/AppName.html . So all we have to do is copy the NoticeMessage.html to the AppName.html when we down the server. When the user tries to connect during downtime the message will be displayed by Tomcat - (If I automate this in a batch file Stop and Start Server it could be a good solution)

rocketman

Just curious .... why do you need to take the server down to do a backup? are you taking a complete server image?

ACDC

Just curious .... why do you need to take the server down to do a backup? are you taking a complete server image?

Before we carry out a BSV update we always do a backup of the database, so it's mainly when we are doing server maintenance