Fixing fs.file-max too small remotely

I was testing some things and breaking things in order to see if I could fix them. I was connected to a remote machine via Putty ssh and ended up changing fs.file-max to a very (comparatively) small number (4096) using the command

sudo sysctl -w fs.file-max=4096

Things began shutting down and freezing up and eventually, the connection got shut down (pretty much expected). It seems like it may have shutdown physically, but I'm unsure (it's remote and I don't have physical access). I've tried reconnecting via putty, winscp, and just pinging it, but no responses. Is there any way to fix this from my local machine since I have no physical access to the machine possible? The remote machine is a CentOS 64 bit with a decent bit of disk space, RAM, and computing power if that matters.

Also, I have seen this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32473740/how-to-solve-a-fs-file-max-value-too-low but as I said, I have no physical access.