Clarification - do I want to setup a 'reverse proxy' or do I want something else?

[Charles W Buege <cbuege@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All - 

I asked this question a couple weeks
ago and my topic was hijacked and never answered, so I figured I'd wait
a little while and then ask again.

Here's my situation:  I've got
multiple Apache web servers running on different platforms (IBM POWER7,
Red Hat, CentOS, Windows) and I want to setup a way for my users so that
when they try to access one of the sites that is down for maintenance,
they get a message like this:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Server Off-Line for Maintenance

Our servers will be back on line on
Monday, January 1, 2011 at 8:00 AM.

Thank you for your patience.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was under the understanding that to
do something like this I'd want to setup a 'front-end reverse proxy' server
in front of all of these other servers to do this task.

Is it a 'reverse proxy' I want to use
here?  Is it something else I should be setting up?

And if anyone can then point me in the
right direction for learning how to do this correctly (YouTube videos,
books, PDFs, etc.), it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Charles

cbuege (at) moreycorp (dot) com - if
you would like to e-mail me back directly, feel free!!






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