We use Pound as a reverse-proxy and loud-balancing frontend to our web cluster here in the office. Today we had some NAT problems with our proxy server and ended up with some server downtime. Pound defaults to outputting a cryptic error message when it can’t reach a valid host:

The service is not available. Please try again later.

This isn’t very helpful to clients who probably have no idea why their site is unreachable. After getting NAT back up and running, I decided to work on replacing this error with something a little more useful.

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