Sometime we need to bring down database server and DC for maintenance. Should I quiesce farm and shut down the WWW Service? If I keep it running, how to redirect all requests to the Maintenance notice page? I tried to use the ASP.NET app-offline. It worked sometime, but sometime it returned 404 page not found.

I'm not sure I understand what you're asking. What kind of maintenance is being done? Is it maintenance on the SharePoint server or just the Domain Controller?ThanksChttp://www.cjvandyk.com/blog

Sometime on the MOSS server only, sometime on the domain controller and the database server. What is the best practice in these two scenarios.

Hi, I agree with Cornelius. I think it depends on what kind of maintenance you want to do, such as securing the domain controller, moving the database. For database maintenance, please have a look at the official reference below.Maintaining databases (Windows SharePoint Services 3.0)http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc825316.aspx By the way, please note that always perform the maintenance during non-business hours to minimize the impact. Hope it helps. Lily Wu

I havent tried this.. but you can give a try..1> go for the quiesce farm.. This shall disable all the users from access the web application... once done, it will not allow users to make any changes on the application..2> then you can open up the sharepoint designer and go to the pages folder (check for the application URL first and go to that folder accordingly) and then create a new page as default.aspx and get that maintenance notice on that and rename the other actual default.aspx as default_old.aspx ...3> once you maintenance is done, you can chnage the name again and get back the site...Hope this helps...

SharePoint cannot run when the database server or DC is down. For a true maintenance page your best bet is to setup a new application in IIS. This would be a non-SharePoint application and either straight ASP.NET or HTML. I would configure it for the same port as your site. Obviously you can only have one of those applications up at a time. When starting maintenance, shut down the SharePoint application and activate the Maintenance one. SharePoint Developer | Administrator | Evangelist -- Twitter -- Blog - http://nextconnect.blogspot.com

You can put a page named "app_offline.htm" on the root folder of your SharePoint webservers. This would redirect any request to any pages in your SharePoint farm to this HTML page. For this to work the page size should be > 512 KB, put some junk HTML in commented state to this page.