I should not stay up that late. Noticed that the silc network was restarted and shortly after that Marcus asked what was going on. Logged into the server and saw that the server was restarted. Not good, especially after we’ve upgraded to Apache2 just 24 hours before. While I was trying to figure out what was going on, my ssh connection died and connections were no longer possible. Even the fallback remote console was not responding. Logged into Strato’s config menu, the status of our server was “partially disabled”. What a strange message. Wrote an email to customer support to find out what was going on.
Checked the typical webpages but at 3am hardly anyone was awake. Strato’s webpage was down as well, so I figured it was a network outage. Went to bed and hoped that everything would start working after some hours of sleep.

Woke up at 10am and decided to check the server. Connections were possible again but the mail server was complaining. Traced the problem to a non-working ldap server. Apparently the ldap database had been damaged. Glad that we had cleartext backups, so restored a recent backup and ldap was happy again.

Got a reply from strato tech support in the afternoon, saying, that they had some unplanned maintenance and erroneously disabled our server. But thanks to their “tüv-geprüftes wiedereinschaltkonzept” (sorry, I have no idea how to translate that, heck, I don’t even know, what this means in german) everything was restored and working again.