I was busy adjusting some networking settings of the server, when one of the commands unexpectedly caused the server to lose its network connectivity. This should not have happened, I've used the exact same 'ifconfig eth0 mtu 1280' command elsewhere without problems. Based on the CPU load graphs, I suspect I hit some sort of a network driver bug. The friendly guys at our ISP rebooted the server this morning to bring us back online. Before rebooting they took some pics of the console and it showed that there were indeed some sort of problems with the bnx2 driver.
Sorry for the downtime. Now you can enter the notes that you were holding back during this time
