Putting the site in maintenance mode?

[Lars Jørgensen]

Hi,

New to varnish so forgive me if this has been answered before. I tried  
searching but mainly got instructions on how to maintain a boat :-)

I have defined a vcl_error stanza in my vcl that puts a "sorry, we're  
currently maintaining the site" sign up, when all backends are sick.

I had a chance to test it out today because I had to disable all  
backends to do some maintenance. The sign didn't go up and I got some  
half-baked version of my site in the browser. I restarted varnish and  
of course immediately invalidated all backends and put the sign up.

Is there any way to put the whole site in maintenance mode in a nice  
way? Like telling varnish "don't serve any content, just the error  
page"?


-- 
Lars Jørgensen
Gyldendal IT
tlf. 33 75 57 95