IP-failover maintenance page

So I have 2 linodes which hosts php applications. Linode1 has all the production sites and linode2 has the development or test sites if you will. When I do upgrades on linode 1 I wish for all the visitors to see the 503 page which resides on linode 2. Can I achive this through Linode's ip-failover or is it recommended to just stick with changing the DNS records?

I tried checking off linode2 on linode1's IP-failover in the manager, run eth0:1 up linode1.ip on linode 2 and then eth0 down on linode1 but to no success. Am I missing something? The documentation on the IP-failover works seems to be a bit thin.

Thanks in advance for your advice. :D