Wifi help needed

[dan00204]

I am the network administrator at a college, we have 2nd site which is our the university side of things. We have a student accommodation block at the uni which gives the students in there access to Wifi. Something strange has been happening for a week now, student's smart phones and tablets will connect just fine. But all laptops connect but say 'No internet, secured'.

 

I have already tried the obvious-

 

Restart routers

Restart switches

Forget and reconnect

Tried ipconfig /renew and ipconfig /release and ipconfig /flushdns

Ran updates and firmware update on the routers

 

My next port of call is a static IP. Going in there with a laptop on a static IP and see if that resolves the issue.

 

Any more ideas or help anyone can come up with would be good?

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Also, we use Unifi and PF Sense as the controllers

[Norphy]

Is there an internet filter between this wifi network and the internet? Does it have msftconnecttest.com blocked?

[dan00204]

Yes there's a firewall which runs PF Sense

[Norphy]

Is this just Windows laptops or Linux and Macs as well?

[Aprice]

Few basic tests:

Do you have an IP Address (not 169.)

Can you ping the gateway (PFSENSE) local interface

Can you ping 8.8.8.8 (assuming Ping is allowed out)

can you ping google.com (DNS Problem?)

Traceroute to google.com / 8.8.8.8 (following the expected path, or being dropped?)

[Davit2005]

MS carp nlasvc?? But yep as to rule out run ping tests to external IPs as well as external FQDN to make sure they resolve but also nslookup against Google or Cloudflare public IPs as others have said.

[RLR]

Windows machines will do an internet check when they sign in to determine if they have connection or not. If they can't reach msftconnecttest.com to download the text file then they will say they don't have internet although they actually do.

 

There is a big thread here that has some suggestions to try:

https://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-10/216550-windows-10-random-no-internet-issue.html

[dan00204]

I can ping external IPs and DNS is working. I am able to pnig bbcnews.co.uk

[paulellam]

Is someone hammering the connectivity? Had this once in a student accommodation

[mikeprice]

Probably obvious and already tried

but are the phones etc connecting to the same bands as the laptops?

e.g. some 5GHz - other 2.4 GHz

 

are they connected via different access point? (had that once - one port was duff on a router and it was connected to an access point!)

 

Good Luck

[Michael]

I've observed similar behaviour recently with some Android based interactive panels/screens. Performing a firmware upgrade and a reboot resolved this in my case.

 

Similarly iOS and Windows devices were connecting to WiFi (Unifi) without any issues. It just sounds like your issue is the other way round.

[dan00204]

Hi all,

 

I've been over there today and put my laptop on a static IP. This worked. I was able to ping 8.8.8.8 but not Google.com or our domain using its name etc. Definitely DHCP/ DNS issue. Thanks all,