nextbox suddently unavailable: "You don't have permission to access this resource.Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe"

[jerabaul29]

I have set my nextbox to be available through internet, by using dedyn.io and port forwarding on my router.

Today I was not able to reach it, getting the following message when I was trying to connect to the XX.dedyn.io url of my nextbox:

You don't have permission to access this resource.Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe

I:

• checked that the port forwarding was well enabled on my router as usual - this was well the case
• checked that I could ssh into the nextbox from the internet (I also have port forwarding to port 22 to allow remote administration): that was well the case and I was able to ssh into it
• from the ssh-ed terminal, issued a reboot order: sudo reboot now

Within a few minutes, the nextbox was up again. This confirms that this was an issue with the nextbox, not with my network or port forwarding setup. Luckily I have enabled ssh remote admin, otherwise, the only way to fix this would have been to physically go to where the nextbox is located, and physically reboot it (which was not convenient for me this time).

A few notes from this:

• any idea what the cause was / has this happened to anybody else?
• would it be possible to set up a (user enabled) background job that periodically (once per half hour?) checks that the nextbox is available through its expected method (reverse proxy or dedyn), and if not available more than a few times in a row (two times in a row?), reboots the nextbox? That would allow to recover automatically from this kind of transient issues.