Oh - sorry, then I completely misunderstood your answer. I thought you wanted to do it the other way around, automating things through ssh , but you want to issue commands through a secondary way.

I would first look at where the problem stems from and whether running a second sshd on a different port allows you to do the management through that one. If the server is unresponsive due to network/io/ram congestion, that won't help you though.