On occasion we need to shut off all updates for all products/branches. This could happen because of a disastrous update scenario, a downtime, or some other unforeseen reason.

Shutting off updates

• Go to the Balrog Admin interface's rules page, VPN is required.
• Find the rule with "Global shut off" in its "Comment" field (eg choose the "Firefox" Product/Channel filter and go to the last page)
• Click the 'Update' button to modify the rule
• Change the priority to "10000" and click the "Save Changes" button
• Remove any filter to double check that shut off rule has highest priority (ie appears first in the list), so that it overrides all other rules

The load balancer will serve cached responses for a few minutes then all responses should be <updates></updates>.

This affects all products, including Firefox, Thunderbird, GMP, SystemAddons, B2G, etc.

Re-enabling

• Go to the Balrog Admin interface's rules page.
• Find the rule with "Global shut off" in its "Comment" field. Change its priority to "1" and click the "Update" button.