maintenance mode

Can anyone advise the best way to test a 'live' site without having to go into Maintenance Mode?

Basically I just want to ensure that it doesn't appear on search engines or get listed, and if there is something that is advised it needs to be something that won't be to the detriment of the site indexed/listed when I actually want it to.

For those that might be questioning why I want to do this without using MM is basically to test a Facebook login to see how it works and performs etc.

Thanks

Stephen

One of my sites runs behind two Varnish dedicated servers with something like 12 web servers running Pressflow 6 and four MySQL full InnoDB database servers. This more than handles the load the site runs on.....until.....I put it into maintenance mode.

At this point Varnish stops caching the pages as they aren't sending HTTP 200.

The load average on the Apache/PHP boxes shoots very quickly to above 100 and in general the boxes are looking for cliffs to jump off.

I'm wondering what others do about this.

I think these are some options.

I saw someone post to how they run a custom SQL script to put a Drupal site into maintenance mode using Drush's SQL commands, but here's the easier way without any SQL code necessary. Using Drush 3.0 we can turn a site on and off in a split second using the following command:

drush vset site_offline 1

To turn the site back online we run the same command but change the 1 to a 0, like so:

drush vset site_offline 0

*To learn more about the VSET command for Drush just type: drush help vset