Nginx – Maintenance page on nginx, best practices

best practicesmaintenancenginx

I want to configure the server to show a maintenance page when it exist. I tried this code and works:

location / {
    try_files /maintenance.html $uri $uri/ @codeigniter;
}

But I noticed it would be served with a 200 status code, and it can cause confusion to search engines. I think the best practice would be returning a 503 status code. On google I find several relevant pages about it, like this. However, they use if to make the redirect and according to nginx documentation it isn't safe to use ifs.

Is there a way of doing it without using if? Is safe to use if in this case?

Thanks.

Best Answer

I think the best practice would be returning a 500 status code.

I think you mean 503 instead of 500.

they use if to make the redirect and according to nginx documentation it isn't safe to use ifs.

No. Only return is 100% safe inside if in location context.

According to nginx documentation, you can specify an HTTP status code as the last argument to try_files. I've tried this but it didn't work.

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How to combine HTTP and HTTPS blocks.

server {
    listen 80;
    listen 443 default ssl;

    # other directives
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This was posted as an answer to a different question. See here.

Active Directory Naming – Best Practices for Windows Active Directory Naming

This has been a fun topic of discussion on Server Fault. There appear to be varying "religious views" on the topic.

I agree with Microsoft's recommendation: Use a sub-domain of the company's already-registered Internet domain name.

So, if you own foo.com, use ad.foo.com or some such.

The most vile thing, as I see it, is using the registered Internet domain name, verbatim, for the Active Directory domain name. This causes you to be forced to manually copy records from the Internet DNS (like www) into the Active Directory DNS zone to allow "external" names to resolve. I've seen utterly silly things like IIS installed on every DC in an organization running a web site that does a redirect such that someone entering foo.com into their browser would be redirected to www.foo.com by these IIS installations. Utter silliness!

Using the Internet domain name gains you no advantages, but creates "make work" every time you change the IP addresses that external host names refer to. (Try using geographically load-balanced DNS for the external hosts and integrating that with such a "split DNS" situation, too! Gee-- that would be fun...)

Using such a subdomain has no effect on things like Exchange email delivery or User Principal Name (UPN) suffixes, BTW. (I often see those both cited as excuses for using the Internet domain name as the AD domain name.)

I also see the excuse "lots of big companies do it". Large companies can make boneheaded decisions as easily (if not moreso) than small companies. I don't buy that just because a large company makes a bad decision that somehow causes it to be a good decision.

Best Answer

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