GNOME freezing up when on a non-internet-routed AP

I’ve been working on an experimental internet access point for my car based on a raspberry pi that auto-joins various sundry wifi’s it can find or relaying out through my phone.

It doesn’t work right yet. But I’ve noticed something awful.

If I join it’s ESSID, then my gnome desktop FREEZES up, sometimes for two whole minutes at a time, when the internet to the AP is down. I have a clock widget in the top of my gnome desktop, and it displays seconds and the seconds stop ticking. I also have a pingtime widget and a cpu temp widget, and I know the highest temp is under 75 C when the freeze begins, and I’ve handled much higher temps before. I know that the ping stops updating as well (it normally updates every 5 seconds).

Does gnome have some sort of gnome-specific /var/log/messages general log of what’s going on and what’s failing that I could check?

I really think it’s gnome. my gui session locks up but ctrl-alt-f3 or whatever gets be to a tty that I can log into and look on htop and I don’t see anything unexpected. Firefox taking up all my ram like normal, gnome using a lot of cpu like normal, but no better details than that.

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All of this should go into the journal:

Gnome uses network manager, so it could either be the underlying network manager bits or the Gnome UI bits for it. The logs should have info there. You should also be able to use nmcli without Gnome to interact with your network interfaces etc.

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I have a similar problem when my upstream connection fails but the default route persists.

Restarting the resolver helps to workaround the issue:

sudo systemctl restart systemd-resolved.service

This appears to be related to the NetworkManager connectivity check.

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