Fail Whale

[James Pearson]

Excerpts from maillists0's message of 2013-11-15 12:52:31 -0800:
> In some load balancers (haproxy, for example) you can create a backend that
> only gets hit if all the other backends are down. A common enough setup is
> to have a local apache serve a polite "oops" page on an alternate port on
> the loopback. Is there some clever way to do this with Varnish? I've read
> to docs and googled but can't find anything like this. If this is possible,
> a doc to the right link would be awesome.

If all you want to do is serve a static page, you can do that in vcl_error.  We
read in an external HTML file (that's also used for other things) using
std.fileread[0].  Here's the entire thing[1]; perhaps it will be useful.

 - P

[0]: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.varnish.misc/8099
[1]: http://dpaste.com/hold/1465288/