How Add 503 status to IIS 6.0

[Jinx14678]

Hi,

Our IS department is bringing down our network for maintenance this weekend for 24 hours. I am worried about search engine implications.

all Traffic is being diverted, and the diverted traffic is being sent to another server with IIS 6.0

From all research i have done it appears creating a custom 503 error message in IIS 6 is not possible  Source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb877968.aspx

So my question is does anyone have any suggestions on how to do a proper 503 temporarily unavailable in IIS 6.0 with a custom error message?

Thanks

[Hurf]

This might help:

"If you have an ASP.NET web application site, and you place a text file named "app_offline.htm" in the root of the site, all requests to that website will redirect to that app_offline.htm file. Basically, if you need to take an entire ASP.NET site offline, you can place some nice message in that file. Then, any new requests to a URL, any URL, in that website will redirect to that file allowing you to do maintenance to the site, upgrades, or whatever. It is not really a redirect though. ASP.NET essentially shuts down the site, unloads it from the server, and stops processing any requests to that site. That is, until you delete the app_offline.htm file - then things will continue as normal and your ASP.NET site will load up and start serving requests again.

A super-cool side effect of this is that any files that are locked by the site, such as a database or other resources, are freed since the application domain has been unloaded from the server. This allows you to remove the locks from those files and replace them, without the need to do a full IISRESET, taking down other sites on the server. One thing to keep in mind with this file however, make sure you out enough content in it so it is larger than 512 bytes or IE will consider it a 404 and will display the 404 instead of the contents of your app_offline.htm file."

Source