Hello,

I've been having an ongoing problem with our Debian web server. The connection to the machine completely drops out. I can't ping it at all. If I have an SSH session open when the connection fails, it is terminated and I have to wait for it to come back online.

I use this server to host our company website as well as our intranet enviornment (reports, employee resources, etc.). When the connection drops, I can still access our company website still which doesn't make any sense to me... if the connection has dropped, how would I still be able to access it? It's not cached, because I can browse around the site and download documents..

So far, I have tried replacing the network card, and I've been through just about every log I can think of many times. I've searched around the internet but it seems that my issue is rather unique... Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Several thoughts. It's hosting your website but the website doesn't become unavailable. This is either because there is no network problem on that server, the server is using a different network interface for the website, or the information you're seeing when you browse to your website is cached in a network appliance or the browser you're using.

View the network situation on the server when this problem occurs. You may be losing your ssh session due to a problem at the client. Even if the website and ssh interfaces are different on the server, the server may be fine, it may be a client problem on that particular subnet. Or you may be losing your ssh session due to a configured timeout threshold.

You say you can't ping the server. From one or several clients? And can the clients ping each other? Some of this will tell you if the server or your clients have a problem. To help determine if your network has a problem, at each endpoint, server and client; you should be able to ping the assigned IP address for the machine; i.e. ping yourself. You should also be able to ping the loopback IP address 127.0.0.1. These results will tell you whether or not networking is working properly at each given system; again both client and server.

I had a similar experience such as yours and found out that it was my Ethernet cable doing the dirty (failing) on me, when I changed the cable everything is working fine, so, check your cables.