MasterP said:
If by surgery you mean walk up to a rack, open it, and push the magic reset button then yeah.
actually no it was much more complicated than that. though that is where I started. For some reason routing and remote access had been enabled so nothing was going to the server and every request leading to it ended up in a mysterious black hole in the internets… even though the network was working fine. Disabled it, rebooted and voila, working server.