After nearly a day of downtime we've got almost everything up and running again.
What appears to happen is the main system's update caused a package to corrupt, upon a restart the system refused to turn back on.
After an intervention by the techs and a few extra attempts, we made the system start back up. I of course had a short lived conversation with a tech using the login screen username field which was sort of entertaining.
We then had a problem with the system keyboard layout being different from my own, and it led to hours and hours of attempts to gain access.
Following gaining access, after mostly mixing up an O with an 0... the network manager refused to connect, after yet more work around I was able to restore access and we've now started everything back up.
It seems like when it rains it pours, but we learned from this. One thing led to another problem and things kept collapsing time after time, I almost said fuck it a few times but oi, we got it.
Lessons learned:
- Don't confuse a capital o with a zero.
- Learn french so when you're in a French companies rescue mode you can read it and use it.
- Turning off and on again does not always work... sometimes it doesn't turn back on.
Please report any problems to me directly if you are having trouble accessing any service.