academy needs an outage page for when the database is down or site is otherwise troubled. look into how this is implemented for www.redhat.com
outage page is at /errors/outage.html and andrew is configuring proxies to point there when app servers are hosed. however, until the latest rpm goes live, a database outage will still result in a 500.
implemented as two parts: 1) there's an outage page for planned outages. SOC has responsibility to put this in place during outages. 2) there's an outage page for unplanned database outages (when the DB handle becomes bogified). unfortunately, it will be difficult to test whether this is actually working on the live system until we have an unplanned DB outage. nevertheless it's in place.