I tried pretty much all of the approaches outlined above without success
on nginx 0.6.37 (posting this in June 2009. Get the version # using:
nginx -v)
The one approach I found did work was putting the following in the
server section of my config files:

error_page 503 @503;
location @503 {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /system/maintenance.html break;
}

if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) {
return 503;
}

I found it in the internet archive, posted by Lee Jensen and credited to
Ezra.

K.
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