What is your weirdest self-hosting problem you've had to solve? For me: Mouse inside the server.

The mouse did not survive interrogation.

Also mouse not pictured.

For a while, the windows machine I was using kept randomly becoming unresponsive (both via network, as well as the keyboard+mouse) and I just could not figure out why. Everytime it did, I’d have to force a shutdown by holding the power button until it shutoff, then press it again to start back up. Sometimes this happened while I wasn’t home, so it had to just stay offline until I was.

I got sick of having to do this; so I replaced the power button with a transistor and a RPI. The PI would ping the server every 5min; if it failed to get a response 3 times in a row, it would trigger the transistor for 10sec, release for 3sec, then press and release again; forcing a poweroff then starting the machine again. It’d also write these events to a log file. I think it was around twice a week ish.

Never did figure out what the cause of the lockup was; but it stopped when I replaced windows with Debian.

I also had a machine that would randomly crash on Windows, but not on Linux.

I’m pretty sure it was some sort of hardware failure, as it also sometimes failed to boot Linux. But if it booted Linux, it would be stable until I shut it down.