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Sonicwall is allowing VPN but no other internet access (users cannot access websites, mail is not coming in, etc...)

I have a Sonicwall Pro 2040 and I'm having the strangest issue. From our company site we cannot access websites, receive mail, or do any other external forms of traffic. However, I can easily connect to my server using the Sonicwall VPN from off site. If I remote desktop to a computer while doing the VPN I cannot access the internet (from that remote desktop) yet I can easily do all of it on mine (the one I'm connecting from).

Any ideas on what I should look at or anything else that might help describe the issue more? I've checked everything from the router to the access rules. What really threw me was that I can easily connect to our network from home. And yes, our internal networking is working fine.

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KellyNaylor

ASKER

Thanks Feptias, I accepted your answer since I fixed it right as you responded.

It ended up being some sort of DNS issue. Every once in a while I'll have a Sonicwall issue where it locks up access, which made me to believe it may be the culprit. However after spending 2+ hours researching everything I came up with the idea it might be a DNS issue. I did everything I could think of including restarting the servers. Finally I decided to remove the forwarders in the DNS setup. After that I tried a DNS lookup once more using the CMD prompt and right away it found www.google.com (always a good website to use for testing).

Once again my network is working. Now if only I knew why this happened suddenly would I be happy.

Thanks again for the response - it's never fun to spend hours playing with DNS on a Sunday.

-Matthew

Member_2_1968385

Could it simply be that a problem arose with the DNS servers you were forwarding to? I see this happen from time to time with various external DNS servers, even those provided by large ISP's - it is useful to keep a list of several DNS servers so you can quickly move an alternative to the top of the list of forwarders if needed. I know that some of the experts on EE recommend not having any forwarders and just letting your Windows DNS server do recursive lookups for any domain that is not defined in the local forward lookup zones.