Help with mod_proxy

["Todd Nine" <todd.nine@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,
  I'm using mod_proxy and I am having some issues.  I have several VMWare images that will be used for development and testing, I want the instance to be served via a single Apache server.  I can then just display a nice error that we're currently maintaining a system when we bring it down.  I'm putting each virtual host in it's own .conf file in the 
conf.d directory.  A .conf file looks like this.

LoadModule proxy_module mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module mod_proxy_http.so

# Put this with your other VirtualHosts, or at the bottom of the file
<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName gforge.mydomain.com

    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyPreserveHost On

    <Proxy *>
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Proxy>

    ProxyPass / http://192.168.221.101/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://192.168.221.101/

    <Location />
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Location>


</VirtualHost>

Now, I am having a problem, and have a question.  First if all of the servers I am connecting to via the proxy server are not running, all of the virtual hosts that I'm proxying fail with the following error message for every back end server that's not running.  This seems to cause all proxying to fail.

[Fri Nov 24 14:07:26 2006] [error] (113)No route to host: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 192.168.221.102:80 (192.168.221.102) failed

How can I set up the virtual host proxy to not cause an error if it cannot connect to the back end server?  Second, how can I set up a default "the server is under maintenance" page with the host name in it?  Where would I find this documentation?  I've been digging though Apache's site and Google's returned examples, but I can't seem to find anything that gives me a concrete example.

Thanks,
Todd