Cross-posting this from Lemmy world where it seems my post coming from piefed.ca is not federating.
This is something that seems to happen randomly to my little RaspberryPi 4B homeserver, like once every few months maybe.
What happens is that out of nowhere (meaning I didn't make any change to config or installation) I cannot reach any services I host on it (i.e. Jellyfin, Anchor notes...). I cannot access it via SSH at all, connection keeps timing out.
Ping however gives a signal. I can see/hear its running and doing something, since I hear the external HDD working. It is running headless and I have no monitor and/or keyboard I could connect.
So far my only way out is to just switch its power off, which is obviously not good for the hard drive. It has happened now like half a dozen times over the past few years, so I am wondering what a better way is to handle this. This was on RPI OS and now its happening on DietPi, so seems not related to the OS version.
I tried sending a shutdown signal via SSH but that also just times out, so how do I get it to shutdown properly?
Secondly, what kind of logs could I look at or start collecting to make sense of this?
Do you have a display and keyboard you can connect to it? If you can get video out, and it accepts keyboard input, you can just log in locally and reboot.
I have a desktop system that crashes similarly, though pings also fail. Unfortunately for me, local access also doesn't work so I simply hard power cycle it like what you've been doing for your Pi.
From my post. But also it sits in a shelf where anyway don't have much space to put anything else. It also happens too rarely that it wouldn't make sense to get specifically for this a display and keyboard in place.
Oh apologies, I missed that line in your post.
You wouldn't need to keep the monitor/keyboard there the whole time. Just connect them temporarily when it has the issue. This obviously doesn't work if you don't have a monitor or a keyboard you could borrow from a different system.