Terminology clarification question.....

[Charles W Buege <cbuege@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Everyone - 

This is a request for education on proper
terminology and I hope I'm asking this in the right place.  If I'm
not, please feel free to point me in the right direction.

I've been working with the Apache server
(primary under CentOS, but some under Red Hat and on XAMPP stacks as well)
and have been tasked with a project.

Periodically, we need to have our web
sites down for maintenane - updates, backups, etc.  What I've been
told to do is find a way to have a 'front end' to our web sites so that,
when they are down for maintenance, that then end-users will receive a
message 'This site is down for maintenance till XX:XX AM/PM' or such.

Here are my questions:
- What would you call what I am trying
to setup?  The reading I've done implies that what I really want to
setup is a reverse proxy server.  Is that what I want to do?
- If it isn't a reverse proxy I want
to set up, what do I want to setup?
- Of the different types of solutions
available, I've been tasked to spend as little money as possible (some
surprise, huh?) so I'd want to do this via open source solutions.  Does
anyone have any suggestions/recommendations for what I could use for this?
 I've read about using Nginx in front of Apache, I've heard of Squid,
I've heard about Tomcat, but as I said I'm still pretty new to this and
am more than willing to take any suggestions that anyone wants to send
me.
- Is this a type of 'clustering/high
availabity' project I'm really looking at here?  I've been hearing
those terms thrown about as well.
- If anyone has any suggestions for
where I can go from here to learn more about the proper terminology so
I don't sound like a complete noob (even though in this case, I kinda am),
I'll take that direction too.

In case it makes any kind of a difference,
the Apache instances are pretty simple - PHP, MySQL and that's about it
- not very involved (for now).  I'm hoping that I can learn what/how
to do this correctly and, when I'm ready to add more capabilities, that
I'll be able to extrapolate out from there what I'd need to do.

Thanks to any direction I can get from
anyone!!

Charles
cbuege at moreycorp dot com - if you
feel like e-mailing me directly!!



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