this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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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?

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[–] burning_beard@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago

I had similar behavior caused by file corruption, and what I believe was a faulty SD card. Also on an RPi. Thankfully I had most of my services and configs backed up and on another disk.

I was also digging through system journals and log files, tracking down what the heck was failing. Eventually I found some system files which were corrupted, and re flashed the SD. Ended up happening a couple times before I replaced it.