No Internet Access warning but it connects fine?

Soldato
Joined
19 May 2009
Posts
3,113
Location
Cannock
Around a month or so ago we've been experiencing the 'No Internet Access' network adaptor warning on various machines at work (various Windows OS) and we can't seem to pinpoint the issue - they connect to the Internet fine. It happens on some machines and not others, then for some bizarre reason the issue can simply go away on it's own or appear on new machines. The problem is we need to address this as it affects Office 365 apps.

We've had a good look at how network awareness works, but this hasn't helped matters as we can't see a reason why the NCSI checks would fail (some we've tested manually). We've tried removing AV, resetting the TCP/IP stack on the machine, bypassing our wan optimiser, ensure no proxies are in the way, changing DNS servers, disabling IPv6 settings, disabling local firewall, rebuilding the machine. The only thing it's going through is over an MPLS network and through an ASA the same as other machines which are working fine.

Has anyone seen any issues like this?
 
I've been getting this on my home PCs after using Pi-hole ad blocker as a DNS server, it seems to be caused by several Microsoft URLs being blocked. I've not really looked into it as it doesn't cause me any issues.

The top 3 URLs blocked are reported as

settings-win.data.microsoft.com
win10.ipv6.microsoft.com
v10.vortex-win.data.microsoft.com

As soon as Pi-hole is disabled all the network warnings clear, it mainly seems to affect a Windows 7 work laptop but I have seen it flash up a few times on my Window 10 machines. The NCSI lookup address www.msftncsi.com is not being blocked.
 
Last edited:
It's made me have a look nothing to do with the Microsoft URLs being blocked, looking at the network traffic going out for NCSI it is doing a DNS look up on

dns.msftncsi.com
ipv6.msftncsi.com
www.msftncsi.com

PI-Hole is randomly blocking www.msftncsi.com at various points throughout the day, I assume the ad lists are automatically updating in the background and some of them are over zealous.

On the odd occasion I have tried to manually lookup www.msftncsi.com it hasn't blocked it. Probably doesn't help the OP but at least clears up what is happening on my network.
 
Last edited:
Thanks Dave, yep these are the DNS queries I'm seeing in my packet captures too and the machines are receiving responses from our DC fine. I also saw a couple of those other URLs you mentioned. At the moment I'm trying to force the issue on a working test machine to see what could be causing it.
 
I too have Pihole on my network and was getting the same behaviour on my Windows 7 desktop. I followed the instructions here http://www.itgeared.com/articles/1074-how-to-mange-network-connectivity/ to disable the warning.

I know that doesn't resolve the issues but if I look at that registry area I can see the urls that have already been identified, plus ActiveDnsProbeContent 131.107.255.255 and ActiveDnsProbeContentV6 fd3e:4f5a:5b81::1. Anything to do with that?
 
Do you use an authenticated proxy? a lot of MS services for some reason do not support authenticating proxy's, we have a bypass list the length of our arms for all the various MS URL's all there apps use.
 
Back
Top Bottom