I had to take down several development web servers and our SharePoint server to do MS upgrade and patching this weekend. From past experience, no one really reads the emails and start hammering my email account (bypassing the support ticketing) and/or blowing up my phone.
This time, I found a spare desktop with XP and IIS from a dev who left the company last week. I created a generic outage message and noted the outage times, servers affected, purpose and that several emails had gone out regarding the outage. I even had time to craft a mailto: link to my ticketing system if there were questions or problems. AWStats also to see if anyone actually hit the site - purely optional, of course.
I then backed up my DNS configs, and repointed all the the A record of the affected servers to my Outage box's IP. After all the servers were rebooted and tested, I put the A records back to normal.
I checked AWStats and found that 30+ different IP's hit the Outage page. Not a single phone call, email or support ticket!! Well, we'll see in the morning if that holds true.
I am sure there are simpler ways of doing this, but I had that XP box with IIS, 10 minutes to herp derp the outage page and get rolling. I will using this for all my outages!
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