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?