When doing quick maintenance tasks on a server, you can use the following approach to keep your site available: Failover the backnet IP address of the host to another host Use arping to tell the network that this IP was switched Remove the IP from the host that needs maintenance In case you do not have a full high availability setup available, you can use ipswitch, a small tool I wrote to assist with this kind of simple failover tasks. You can install it using $ gem install ipswitch
