Configure maintenance messages about upgrading or updating HCL Connections.
About this task
When you upgrade or update HCL 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 HTTP Server or redirect all HTTP
traffic to a server maintenance notification page.
To bring down Connections in preparation for upgrading 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 HTTP Server. Ensure that no other applications are using the HTTP Server.
- Keep the web server running but redirect users to a server maintenance notification page,
following these steps to add
Location
and ErrorDocument
stanzas to
the httpd.conf configuration file for the HTTP Server:
- Create an HTML document named upgrading.html. Add text to the page that
informs users that 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 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.
Important: When your deployment of Connections uses plug-ins, this approach
returns a 403 HTTP
"Forbidden" response code. However, the
Connections plug-ins cannot handle the 403 HTTP response code and display a
userid/password prompt, but providing the user credentials fails. To avoid
this situation, use the following approach, which returns a 500
HTTP
"Internal Server Error" response code. Add the following
lines to the end of the httpd.conf
file:
LoadModule 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
Again,
exclude the IP addresses of servers and desktops, which still have access to the
environment during maintenance. Using the
RewriteCond
lines in
the example, exclude every instance of WebSphere Application Server in your deployment.
What to do next
When the upgrade or update is complete, remove the Location and ErrorDocument stanzas from
the httpd.conf file.