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?
I had a similar situation. Turned out to be a grounding issue.
Kept randomly losing the root m.2 drive and when I'd plug in monitor/keyboard I could type in the terminal, but most executables would not work.
Hard reboot and it'd be good for a few weeks or few months. Then it'd die again. Really annoying losing it because my calendar and email gui is on it.
Once I noticed a small static shock when I touched the case.
I taped a wire to the aluminum case and taped the other end to a grounded chassis of another computer and all was good since then
Interesting. Not sure this is it, definitely didn't feel a shock the last few times I handled the case during this. But thanks for sharing! I'll keep it in mind.