302 Redirect for 24 hours of downtime?

[jovato]

I need to redirect all traffic on my website to a single page that explains that the site is down for maintenance for 24 hours. My questions are:

Should I use a 302 redirect? What is the best way to do this with apache.

Do I need to do anything to make sure that googlebot does not cache the redirected page as the content of all pages on my site?

I appreciate any help.

[tedster]

I'd say use a 503 Service Unavailable status. If you use a 302, googlebot may cache the page.