title: Disable Apache 503 response when Tomcat is down
body: <p>We have some independent servers, connected behind a hardware balancer. Each one of the machines is running Apache 2.2, Tomcat 5.0 and <code>mod_proxy_ajp</code> as the connector.</p>
  
  <p>Everything works fine, but when Tomcat is shutdown, Apache returns error code 503 (as it's expected to do, I guess). The problem is our load balancer, which doesn't interpret error codes. It just thinks "oh, server at machine X has answered -503 blah blah blah, whatever- to my request, it seems to be working, let's keep sending people to that server". </p>
  
  <p>Is there any way to tell Apache not to return anything in this case, instead of the 503 error?</p>