Redirect to offsite server during downtime

[kilburn]

Your approach assumes that bind will keep working in this "disaster" scenario, so I'm not sure about which kind of "disaster" you are speaking about. Two options for me:

-) Total machine disaster, panel upgrade failed and everything is severly fucked up: your isp should allow you to move the IP to another physical server (that was previously acting as secondary nameserver), where you just would have to add an apache catch-all virtual host with the error message for all requests to this IP.

-) Partial machine disaster: you just need apache running on the local machine, and you can simply add the "mainteinance" catch-all virtual host to it (even if bind is down, the secondary nameserver should keep resolving as usual).

Your solution would only handle the case where, on the one hand, bind is not fucked up but apache is and, on the other hand, your ISP doesn't support "moving" IP's. I don't think this is a usual case...

Greets