Extremely Bizarre Internet connectivity issues lately with work laptop

By SirEvan
in Smart Home, Network & Security

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Grand Master

SirEvan

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For the last 2 months or so, I've been having extremely strange issues with my work laptop, and nobody, including my IT department has been able to figure it out. It started while I was working from home one day. I would try to access a site (using google Chrome), and I would get a page time out error, like the page couldn't load. I'd open a new tab, or try a new site (intel.com, google.com, ANYTHING) and it wouldn't load. Ten to twenty or thirty seconds later, it would work again. I was using wireless, so I figured my router to be on the fritz, so I replaced it with a new linksys router. Same issues however.

I started to do some investigation, using resource monitor to monitor sockets and number of connections, and I started running ping -t's to known good sites (like google.com) to see what was going on. Every time I couldn't load a site, ping would stop returning results, as if my cable/connection was disconnected (this happens on wired as well). It's as if my network connection disconnects. This can't be the issue however, because during an "outage" I can open up putty, RDC, whatever, and easily connect to a machine on my network (RDC to my file server for example) without issue, and if I open a browser on that machine through RDC, it works no problem.

If I do a Ipconfig /release and then renew, It works again right away, until it goes "down" again...which takes about 20-30 seconds to come back up. I've also noticed that it happens while I'm docked at work on a wired connection, so it's not the wireless, or my home routers. One thought was that Chrome isn't releasing sockets, or too many are open, but leaving resource monitor open during testing shows no more than 50 or 75 connections open at once...it never goes above that, and during the outage/recovery period, the graph never changes, so its not that.

Anyone have any ideas what it might be?

Grand Master

SirEvan

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haven't tried just IE, a coworker suggested that as well. Yes, I can ping local clients (192.x.x.x., 10.x.x.x) and I have no problem RDC/SSH/Telnet/ftp to anything local, it only seems to affect outbound internet traffic. Drivers are up to date, so I'm thinking either something IT pushed out in a group policy setting (unlikely) or a windows update, since the laptop was working fine before. All my home computers are good. I'm going to try using something like IE or firefox and not launching chrome at all and see if this affects my ping/surfing, but will have to do it tonight after a reboot. It may be something with chrome...

As for AV, we run McCrappy, along with things like Guardian Edge, Mandiant Intelligent response, and a few other big brother apps, so theres a possibility that when these things are scanning or doing whatever it is they do, that it could cause momentary loss of connection.

Grand Master

cork1958

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Ideally you want to boot your computer without all that rubbish in the background (just for testing purposing). Test if the problem still occurs.

Would've been my first thought also. WAY to much "protection"

An update to one of those things is most likely the culprit causing a conflict.

Grand Master

remixedcat

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Would've been my first thought also. WAY to much "protection"

Just like using 5 condoms might stop the baby from happening, but it doesn't feel good and it's awkward as hell...

Mentor

htcz

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Sounds sort of like someone has hacked your home network ...

? I dont think this has anythign to do with that but how did you come to that conclusion?

I agree that too much protection and maybe a update conflicts with another program on your PC and is causing all type of issues.

Safe Mode with Networking and see if problem persist. Then we will continue :)

Rising Star

Aldur82

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Your mention of Group Policy changes triggered something. Do you use a Proxy Server for your internet at work? Might be something skew with the settings. The Proxy Server settings get overlooked quite often because they normally don't cause a problem, Windows just falls back to not using it...until it tries again.

If it's not the Proxy Server settings, then it might be something to do with the wireless network profile. I had an intermittent problem that sounds a lot like this which I fixed it by deleting the existing profile and then setting it up again. It messed up after Windows Update applied some network fixes in a regular update. Since I re-created the profile, the problem hasn't shown up since.

Grand Master

SirEvan

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WE do use a proxy server, although I don't know the exact details, it's something Lockheed runs and all our traffic runs through it. Ended up getting a new laptop and so far it hasn't done it yet on this one *crosses fingers* it's incredibly annoying having to release/renew every 10 minutes just to get internet back.

Thanks guys.

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g0dzilla

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It may have been something like malware or a software update that caused the issue, perhaps upsetting the TCP/IP stack - a TCP/IP stack and Winsock reset *may* have fixed this up.

If if was was a GPO change, then surely some others in the company would have complained of similar issues?

If you use a proxy at work that is set to an IP address then you would most likely have to switch that off when on an external network, i.e. at home or hotel etc. Otherwise you may be using a PAC file and in its script there is a line of code that tells your laptop to connect 'directly' to the Internet if your IP address is not xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, or not on your internal company subnet...

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g0dzilla

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Just like using 5 condoms might stop the baby from happening, but it doesn't feel good and it's awkward as hell...

Oh and lol @ remixedcat above!

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