Blog · Technology
The pinnacle of coincidence is…
…when, one morning, a day after you built a central Out of Office in your dashboard, you realise you also want to control the maintenance mode of all your websites centrally. With one press of a button, take one, a few or all sites “offline”, so that visitors see a tidy maintenance page instead of a messy error. Technically, the server then returns a 503, the code for “temporarily unavailable”. Google understands that, and search engines simply keep your site in the index.
It had only just started running. And then the news about PHP arrived.
First the Out of Office
Yesterday I built a central Out of Office in Foxhold (Vossenburcht in Dutch), my own management dashboard. When it is on, anyone who sends a message through the contact form of one of my sites immediately gets an automatic reply, in the style of that site. Each site has its own switch, a choice of standard texts, and an end date after which it switches itself off.
Then the maintenance mode
This morning I thought: if I can control e-mail centrally, why not “closed for a moment” too? So a second block appeared in Foxhold, with a button per site and two buttons at the top for all four at once. Every change asks for confirmation first, because I do not want to switch off four websites by accident because my thumb was too quick. I can still open the real site myself with a test button, so I can check that everything works while visitors see the maintenance page.
And then the news arrived
While I was still looking happily at my new buttons, the news came in: a security hole had been found in PHP, the language my websites run on. That happens regularly, and it is usually dull: install the update and done. Not this time.
The PHP version on my server no longer receives updates. That version is too old for its makers, and the supplier of the management panel had no fix for it either. And upgrading to a newer version is not simply a matter of pressing a button on this server. It is a server that has been customised a great deal over time, so that everything works exactly the way I want. Normally that is not a bad thing. It just means you cannot simply move to something new when the foundation underneath (and that foundation sits with the provider) is older than you would like.
So we did it ourselves. We took the official fix from the PHP developers, built our own version from it, and moved all the sites over one by one. Thanks to the maintenance mode, that could be done properly: close a site for a moment, put the new version on it, test everything with the test button, and only then open it to the public again. Contact forms, search, mail, photos and blog: everything was checked before a site went live again.
Firmly locked down, and it continues
The nice thing is that it did not stay a one-off emergency repair. I closed a few other doors at the same time: the management panel can now only be reached from my own devices, the back doors of the web server are shut, and there are checks that look at the logs, the security and the mail every week, plus a monthly check for new PHP notices. A warden beeps when something is not running as it should. My server is therefore well secured, with all the jobs and checks we have built over the past weeks. I will only be truly satisfied after the move to a new server, which is planned for 2027.
The lesson
That I finished the maintenance mode a few hours before I needed it, I call coincidence. That it then proved its worth straight away: I call that luck, and perhaps a little bit of the fox.
This is what visitors see when my websites are in maintenance (the pages are in Dutch).
Stay safe,
Pim