Debian Configuration :: USB Gigabit Ethernet Dongles Not Working With Dhclient

My laptop only has a 100Mbit ethernet port, so I bought two external USB gigabit ethernet dongles in the hope of getting faster ethernet speeds. I have never had trouble with Linux supporting ethernet before, but neither of these devices are working. One is an ASIX AX88179 (by TrendNet) and the other is a Realtek RT8153 (by Anker). When I plug these devices in, I get network devices called enx00e04ca82300 or enxd8eb97b61e4d (instead of eth0/eth1 as I would expect).

I can manually set an IP address with "ifconfig enx00e04ca82300 x.x.x.x up" and manually add a route and my network connection works at gigabit speeds. However, the long enx... network device name does not appear to be valid in some sense: tools like dhclient or iptraf or network-manager fail with messages like "no such device" (well, network-manager just hangs). I don't know if it's because the name is so long or because they are not fully registered inside the kernel.

I have vmware workstation installed, and it does some strange things with network devices (setting up bridges for everything). I have disabled its services and see the same behaviour. This looks like a kernel bug to me but it's possible it is a vmware issue. vmware works fine with my wireless and 100Mbit ethernet (eth0 and wlan0).

Realtek device
Some dmesg for the Realtek device:
Code: Select all[10264.619420] usb 4-3.1.1: reset SuperSpeed USB device number 4 using xhci_hcd
[10264.634651] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8800c4221a00
[10264.634653] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8800c4221a48
[10264.634655] xhci_hcd 0000:00:14.0: xHCI xhci_drop_endpoint called with disabled ep ffff8800c4221a90
[10264.647842] r8152 4-3.1.1:1.0 eth0: v1.06.0 (2014/03/03)
[10264.647902] usbcore: registered new interface driver r8152
[10271.452198] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): enx00e04ca82300: link is not ready
[10275.094334] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): enx00e04ca82300: link becomes ready

The Realtek device often crashes after just a few gigabytes have been transferred, with dmesg like this:

Code: Select all[10485.761603] net_ratelimit: 10 callbacks suppressed
[10485.761618] r8152 4-3.1.1:1.0 enx00e04ca82300: Tx status -71
[10488.694340] r8152 4-3.1.1:1.0 enx00e04ca82300: Tx status -71
[10488.711352] r8152 4-3.1.1:1.0 enx00e04ca82300: Tx status -71

[code]...

I have not investigated the ASIX device as much. However, my original 100Mbit ethernet has an ASIX chipset (AX88772) and that works perfectly. I have not observed the ASIX device crashing yet so I am using that for now (haven't used it for long yet though). But as before the device name appears to be invalid and I cannot run tools like dhclient. why two gigabit adapters with completely different chipsets would show up with long device names and support low-level stuff like ARP, ping, and static IPs, but fail with dhclient & network-manager? And the Realtek device seems to like crashing too.