[SOLVED]Connecting to Verizon Mifi (wirelss hotspot) breaks everything

Question

This question is obviously network related, but I thought it would be more appropriately placed in this forum because it's really not so much a connectivity issue.
I recently got my hands on one of those Verizon Wireless Hotspot Mifi devices:
I observed that everything on my install works great until I actually connect to the device. Once connection is established my computer is rendered virtually useless. Specifically, I cannot run any programs (chromium, terminal, anything).
Interestingly, if I boot up and start an instance of chromium and a terminal then those specific instances will continue to (partially) work until I close them, but no new instances can be created. I say partially because I did notice that pages began to load incompletely after a while and eventually the open instance ceased to work as well.
Upon reboot everything works just as it should - unless of course I connect to that wireless hotspot again. Any ideas?
Last edited by sherrellbc (2014-07-07 22:22:15)

Answer 1

As it turns out this issue had nothing to do with the Mifi at its root. Also, I later realized that the problem would only occur if I connected to some network and then switched to another - regardless of which network I started and ended with.
> hostname
Would return "localhost", but would later change to "localhost.localdomain" after a network switch. It turns out that I never set the hostname of my computer, so for whatever reason it was getting changed when connecting to a network.
First, why the change in hostname only when switching to a second network?
And why does the hostname have such a dramatic affect? Namely, once the hostname changed everything breaks?
I read in the Arch wiki that you can dynamically change your hostname at anytime (even temporarily), so what was happening?
Last edited by sherrellbc (2014-07-07 22:18:58)