Filters work great for this. Also, if you have a cluster, you probably have a load balancer in front of the cluster. If you do, then you could have the load balancer direct all your traffic to a server that runs Apache and only served up a 'Sorry the site is down' page. When the site is back up you can redirect the traffic back to the servers. This will allow you to do maintenance on the DB, Application, Tomcat etc.
Subir -----Original Message----- From: Frank W. Zammetti [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 16, 2005 12:36 PM To: Tomcat Users List Subject: Re: How to do "Downtime" with a Apache/Tomcat webapp I had a similar requirement in my app... We had a two-hour window per day when the app was unavailable because background tasks were processing. The server was still up, and so was the app technically, but it was not available. I wrote a filter to take care of this. I had a flag in application context to tell if the app was up or not too, so that if I had to make the app unavailable during a time when it normally was available, I just set the flag. I also defined a single user that was still allowed to get in (another context parameter). This works out great. -- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com Len Popp wrote: > I've been thinking about the same problem, but I haven't gotten around to > working on it seriously. > How about this: Instead of fiddling with the JkMount directives in Apache, > swap the web.xml in your Tomcat app so it points to a minimal servlet that > returns the "Out of service" page for all requests. > Does that sound like it would work? It would be less disruptive because you > don't have to restart Apache (if there's more to the web site than the one > Tomcat app). Plus this will work with stand-alone Tomcat. > > On 5/15/05, Richard Mixon (qwest) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>I'm curious how folks handle letting users know that their webapp is >>down when doing maintenance. >> >>We've got a pretty standard setup. Our informational/static site is >>served by Apache 2.0.x. We use mod_jk to link to a page in our >>webapplications, triggering CMA for authentication and login. We run >>Tomcat 5.5.x. Although we actually have Tomcat clustered, there are >>still times when we need to make the application unavailable. (i.e. >>doing database schema changes, etc.). >> >>I would like for a page to be displayed that says the application is >>temporarily not available. >> >>So, what's the best way to do this? >> >>One way I can think of is to modify the JkMount directives so that may >>context name was not mapped to Tomcat, but instead to a static page - >>the just do a restart. Trouble is some of our users have bookmarks into >>various pages/actions in the application - we would somehow have to mapp >>all pages that began with the context name to this single page. This >>sounds a bit messy. >> >>Is there a more straightforward way of doing this? >> >>Thank you - Richard >> >>--------------------------------------------------------------------- >>To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> >> > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]