We're currently developing several websites using 2 web front-end servers (using apache and tomcat/jboss) with a loadbalancer in front of them. Since I'm a programmer, not a sysadmin, I can only guess what a decent hardware loadbalancer is capable of. I was wondering if a hardware loadbalancer can check on HTTP status codes, so the traffic would be redirected to only one server if the other one is down for maintenance (which now sends out a 503 HTTP error code).

Thanks!

Ben