Ubuntu 10.04 | Terminal Freezes on certain commands | MTU

Question

Isolated problem:

I try to cat /etc/rc.local and I can't do anything in the ssh session after that.

I've tried many of the common things, but it seems to freeze on any command, but I can do an ls, w, and even a df, but when I try to vi into a file or navigate around it just freezes completely and the only way out is X.

This is pretty critical and I'm not understanding of why it is happening. It is remote as well. I tried IPMI and it hangs up too.

Any help would be awesome.

Update: Might be MTU or packet size issue? How can I check something like this?

Answer 1

The fix, but for reason I do not understand so I will leave this here so someone may create better answer was:

ip link set eth0 mtu 1400

Apparently, there is some issue with packet loss and that is what causes the hanging but prevents it from disconnecting overall.

Again, I welcome someone to explain this further to provide a better more thought provoking answer.