Informing users of a migration or update
Configure maintenance messages about migrating or updating IBM® Connections,
About this task
When you migrate or update IBM® Connections, inform your users that the environment is offline temporarily. Inform them directly through a broadcast or email.
During the maintenance period, you can choose either to stop IBM® HTTP Server or redirect all HTTP traffic to a server maintenance notification page.
To bring down IBM® Connections in preparation for migrating or updating, complete the following steps:
Procedure
- Inform users of the planned outage with details of when the maintenance work begins and how long it is scheduled to last. You can send email notifications to community members or post a message to an area of the product that is used to provide site status information.
- Perform one of the following steps:
- Stop the IBM® HTTP Server. Ensure that no other applications are using the IBM® HTTP Server.
- Keep the web server running but redirect users to a server
maintenance notification page, following these steps to add
Location
andErrorDocument
stanzas to the httpd.conf configuration file for the IBM® HTTP Server:- Create an HTML document named upgrading.html.
Add text to the page that informs users that IBM® Connections is temporarily unavailable because
of scheduled maintenance work. Point to the maintenance page by using
these ErrorDocument statements in the httpd.conf file:
ErrorDocument 401 /upgrading.html
ErrorDocument 403 /upgrading.html
- Create a rewrite rule to redirect requests for IBM® Connections. Add the following element to
the httpd.conf file to block all non-authorized
IP addresses from reaching the server and to send the user to the upgrading.htm page:
<Location / >
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from your.ip.address
Allow from ip.address.of.each.machine.in.deployment
</Location>
Note: You must have an Allow element for every instance of WebSphere® Application Server in your deployment.
- Create an HTML document named upgrading.html.
Add text to the page that informs users that IBM® Connections is temporarily unavailable because
of scheduled maintenance work. Point to the maintenance page by using
these ErrorDocument statements in the httpd.conf file:
Important: When your deployment of IBM® Connections uses plug-ins, this approach returns a403 HTTP
"Forbidden" response code. However, the Connections plug-ins cannot handle the 403 HTTP response code and displays a userid/password prompt, but providing the user credentials fails. To avoid this situation, use the following approach, which returns a500 HTTP
"Internal Server Error" response code. Add the following lines to the end of the httpd.conf file:
Again, exclude the IP addresses of servers and desktops, which still have access to the environment during maintenance. Using theLoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^127.0.0.1 RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^192.168.157.139 RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} !^192.168.157.140 RewriteRule !^/upgrading.htm$ /upgrading.htm [L,R=500] ErrorDocument 500 /upgrading.htm
RewriteCond
lines in the example, exclude every instance of WebSphere® Application Server in your deployment.