Ok, my computer started this really annoying habit of not having any networking capabilities after resuming from stand-by. This started in the past week or so… maybe it started when I switched hardware from a D610 with Bluetooth to another D610 without Bluetooth. I don’t know. But it’s annoying as all get out because I’m always docking, undocking, going standby, connecting an external monitor, using a 2nd monitor with the doc, going standalone, using wireless, dock network or onboard nic. I’m in at least two different states each day from working at home, working @ work and working in different rooms.
So what happens is this: I resume the computer from standby, and the network adapter will get an address, default gateway, and all that jazz, but it cannot do anything on the network. No ping, no nothing. It gets an address via DHCP no problem though.
I’ve been living with the problem for a week or so and just end up rebooting. Rebooting takes care of the problem nicely. Except that I have to wait for the reboot AND I have to lose whatever open apps I had going, and that’s the really hard part – Office, Trillian, FeedDemon, Google Desktop, Picasa, VPN, etc. Rebooting takes me out of commission for a while and it sucks.
Today I decided to try to find out what the problem was. Read more below.
Here’s me getting an ip address just fine.
Note that this shows my home network (behind a Fortigate F60), and is on my home wireless network. Same symptoms happen when I’m at work (which also utilizes RFC 1918 space), outside the firewall, on LAN, on dock, or with my mobile broadband wireless cards (Verizon EDGE and EvDO). It’s a constant problem that follows the act of resuming from standby and not a specific kind of network connectivity. I should point out that I recently installed the Sierra Wireless EvDO product and I cannot remember if the problem started when I installed it or not. I’ve since uninstalled it (and a ton of other apps I didn’t need anymore) trying to fix the issue.So I thought maybe the problem was caused by my software firewall (I use ISS RealSecure Desktop Protector), so I disable it for a sec. Nothing.
Next step is to find out what’s actually running on the computer. You can use HiJackThis to print out a report, which I do, but I don’t immediately notice anything weird.
Next step after this is to keep disabling things to see if something is preventing things from working. The converse of this is that maybe something isn’t running after standby that normally does run on startup that isn’t enabling things from working.
I use Sysinternals’ Process Explorer here to see all the apps, threads, sub-processes, etc that are running:
I then launch a constant ping of my default gateway (the closest thing I should be able to ping) and then keep disabling things until I see a change.
Then I go down the list, looking for things that would be network related and a more likely culprit of the problem.
| Application |
Notes |
| iPass |
iPass is awesome. Our company is an iPass reseller – iPass lets you connect to the Internet and your home corporate network from just about anywhere, over wired, wireless, mobile broadband or whatever. It ties in with VPN and security and policy enforcement to allow corporate IT (like me) to have better security on all these mobile endpoints.Anyway, iPass has been known to block stuff like unknown wireless access because of security. I don’t have the iPass system tray on, but it looks like the downloader utility is running.
I kill it off and it doesn’t do anything. |
| Aventail VPN |
Our company is also an implementer of SSL VPN solutions, including the Aventail client. I’m thinking I don’t need that to be running right now, and it is network-related as well.
So I stopped the service and still nothing. |
| Cisco VPN client |
There’s two here – Agent.exe from Cisco and cvpnd.exe. I didn’t know what the STC agent was, so I looked it up and it’s the Cisco SSL VPN agent. The other one is the normal Cisco IPSec agent. I stopped the normal Cisco IPSec service, nothing.
Then I stopped the VPN agent and WOO HOO I have pinging! |
So I’m thinking that I should uninstall and reinstall the cisco agent. I’ll do that and see how it goes.
I’m actually surprised that it started working this soon into the troubleshooting process. I thought for sure I’d be spending a couple hours on it.
