Conclusion: gnome is weird!

[sniffnoy]

Well, it seems I've fixed the problem. (The slowness problem, not the internet problem.) I tried looking up cases of people having similar problems, and found the oddest suggestion: For these people, the problem happened only when the computer was not connected to the internet, and went away entirely if their computer's name was in the 127.0.0.1 entry in the hosts file.

Now how the hell that could be relevant, I don't know. But I put my computer's name in the hosts file, and suddenly it worked! Presumably it only started occurring yesterday because that was the first time since I changed its name that I couldn't connect to the internet. (Which doesn't explain why it would occur in the first place.) See, when I got the computer, it was named "dell-desktop". Even though it was a laptop. Still, I didn't get around to renaming it until pretty recently, and certainly didn't think of the hosts file when I did so.

Well, I'll want to check it again in a few more hours to make sure it's really not just being erratic, but...

-Harry

[0]Wow, was that just yesterday? I've been sleeping a lot lately, I've been kind of sick...

Comments

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Wow. Perhaps that has something to do with the lo network interface?

Also, the next thing I would have suggested would be installing the xubuntu-desktop package from a tty1 or something and trying to log in with Xfce to see if GNOME was the problem.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

*shrug*

Also, the internet thing does seem to just be my computer having a problem with our local network (funny, it never has before) since it seems that some neighbors have left their wireless network unsecured and I can get internet fine using that...

[ahhhdontpokeme.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... were you not also getting issues with sudo? I know when my hosts file didn't map my hostname to 127.0.0.1 in the past the problem I noticed was sudo would complain it couldn't connect to every time I used it. Not sure why anyone would do loopback using hostname rather than "localhost" or just 127.0.0.1, but... *shrug* I don't know the deep secrets of networking and perhaps they have a good reason. Perhaps it has to do with easing internal tracking of some sort--all the hosts files I've seen actually map only "localhost" to 127.0.0.1, and hostname and hostname.domainname to 127.0.1.1.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

No, I have never had any problems with sudo... *shrug*

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Oh, I just renamed it directly, not through whatever gnome's control panel interface for it might be, and of course wasn't thinking of /etc/hosts at the time. :P

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

...OK, actually, turns out, the internet problem was just a bad ethernet cable. D'oh.

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

Heh, everyone always tests if the cable's the problem and it never is. Now you've disproven that and all the times I've seemingly pointlessly checked if the cable was bad are validated. :-P

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, it could be either the cable, or the port on the switch. I haven't bothered to test which yet.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Answer: It's the port.