Prepare IBM Connections for maintenance

Bring down Connections

1. Inform users of the planned outage..

2. Perform one of the following steps:

   • Stop the IHS

     Ensure that no other applications are using the IHS.

   • Keep the web server running but prevent user-access to the deployment during the migration or update.

     We set up a maintenance page and create a rewrite rule in httpd.conf for the IHS to redirect requests for Connections:

     1. Create an HTML document notifying users of the server maintenance window.

        Point to the maintenance page using these ErrorDocument statements:

        • ErrorDocument 401 /upgrading.htm
        • ErrorDocument 403 /upgrading.htm

     2. Add the following element to httpd.conf to block non-authorized IP addresses from reaching the server, and to send the user to the upgrading.html page:
        <Location>
            Order Deny,Allow
            Deny from all
            Allow from your.ip.address
            Allow from ip.address.of.each.machine.in.deployment
        </Location>

        Create an Allow element for every instance of WAS in the deployment.

   This approach returns a 403 HTTP response code for clients, meaning "Forbidden". For the browser client, the maintenance page will be displayed as defined by "ErrorDocument"; however, the Connections plug-ins cannot handle the 403 HTTP response code and will display the userid/password prompt, but providing the user credentials will keep failing. The plug-ins will not ask the user for credentials. To avoid this state, you could use the following alternative approach, which would return a 500 HTTP response code, meaning "Internal Server Error".

   Add the following lines to the end of 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

   Exclude IPs of all servers and desktops. Using the RewriteCond lines in the example, exclude every instance of WAS in the deployment.

When the migration or update is complete, remove the Location and ErrorDocument stanzas from httpd.conf.

Parent topic:
Update and migrate

Related reference:

IBM Connections system requirements