Ideally, of course, we’d have SSH access and I agree that if you can’t ping the switch, you likely won’t be able to SSH. As you’d imagine, an a perfect world, we’d have the switch in this bad state and have SSH access so we can check the logs. Normally, logs don’t survive reboot/reset but there’s a trick we can use to get them to survive reboot. You simply need to SSH into the switch and execute touch /cfg/.persistent.log. But that would then require SSH access in the future to be able to get in and grab the logs.
Let me ask you both this. What do you have plugged in to the switch that’s PoE?