Internet out, but network connections fine

This is a weird one. I’m fairly tech proficient and am looking for a solution that doesn’t involve “restarting the computer three times”.


Right now my MBP (2021 M1 Ventura 13.2.1) is connected to the network via both a wired (USB-C adapter) and wireless connection. Has been for years. I can ping it from another device on my network just fine.


I can open up a terminal and ping Google, Apple, etc just fine. DNS resolves fine and ping responds as well.


But for the life of me, I can’t get either Safari or Chrome to load any sites.

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 13.2

Posted on Mar 15, 2023 6:46 AM

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Posted on Mar 17, 2023 6:18 AM

Just happened again right now and disabled my VPN, but still couldn't get to anything. Interestingly, I reconnected to the VPN and couldn't even ping my corporate systems, but pinging google/apple/etc still worked. While still not loading in the browser.


Though the VPN talk had me go in and take a look at my network config beyond just two wired/wireless interfaces and saw that I had a proxy setup by AdGuard. Disabling that and everything instantly started working. Will test, but that definitely seems to be the culprit. I'll reach out to their forum and see if it's a known bug.


Thanks all.

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Mar 17, 2023 6:18 AM in response to Shareef Yousef

Just happened again right now and disabled my VPN, but still couldn't get to anything. Interestingly, I reconnected to the VPN and couldn't even ping my corporate systems, but pinging google/apple/etc still worked. While still not loading in the browser.


Though the VPN talk had me go in and take a look at my network config beyond just two wired/wireless interfaces and saw that I had a proxy setup by AdGuard. Disabling that and everything instantly started working. Will test, but that definitely seems to be the culprit. I'll reach out to their forum and see if it's a known bug.


Thanks all.

Mar 15, 2023 7:58 AM in response to Shareef Yousef

Shareef Yousef wrote:

Same subnets. It’s a corporate VPN, but has always worked while connected via wired and wireless. The issue only occurs rarely after waking from sleep.


Same subnet depends on the router doing the correct thing; being transparent to the routing. Different subnets would be typical.


This could be a VPN bug, an IP routing issue, an IP routing issue with the VPN, or a macOS bug.


Do things work better when one network connection exists, and not two?


You’re also going to need to do some digging around preferred routes and related, and whether that VPN is set to route all traffic, or just some of it.

Mar 15, 2023 9:28 AM in response to Shareef Yousef

Shareef Yousef wrote:

This is definitely not on the routing (external to the computer) end as a computer restart resolves the issue. Additionally, as mentioned, I can successfully ping various sites.


Routing is still in play.


As for it being VPN, my local network is 192.168.10.0/23 and the vpn I use is split tunnel and only routes 10.2.0.0/16 and 10.4.0.0/16 networks. I'll have to keep it in mind to try seeing if disabling the VPN would fix the issue the next time it happens, but again, considering it only routes 10.x networks (ie, private only), can I can't see how that's an issue in getting pages to load in the browser.


VPNs are based on IP routing.


You have routes for the VPN, and routes for each network connection.


And what might not be obvious at first, there is no correlation between the route used outbound and the route used to return. This can mean that packets can reach the destination, but response packets can get dropped on the way back.


One other thought I had is that a local web server loaded in the browser during that issue. This got me wondering, do browsers use alternate DNS servers for resolution/caching?


There is no alternate DNS, there is IP routing.


Apple has two DNS implementations, traditional DNS and multicast DNS, and both integrated into macOS.


Where things get interesting with DNS on macOS, some command line tools bypass the local DNS caching. Browsers and such, typically not. Command line tools can byoass, though.


If IP routing is messed up, there will usually be connectivity issues.


And if there are DNS issues, you’ll usually get timeouts and errors. A thirty second pause in activities tends to be a bad DNS server (a DNS server translation timeout), for instance.


I really don’t like finding two controllers in the same subnet, either. That makes things ambiguous.

Mar 15, 2023 9:33 AM in response to MrHoffman

Thank you for the detailed response. I'll test disconnecting VPN the next time this issue occurs. Day to day, wired/wireless are both connected while my machine remains connected to VPN 24/7. Everything works as intended.


I should also add that the length of the outage varies. Sometimes it'd reconnect after a few seconds, other times it takes a few minutes, while other times it takes too long and I restart.


I did try disconnecting both wired/wireless network interfaces and reconnecting them, but the problem continued. Though I didn't ever try disconnecting the VPN tunnel, so if VPN is mis-routing then that would explain why a restart would fix it. The other times where it comes back after a few minutes could be the VPN tunnel re-establishing itself.


Very interesting persecuting on routing/vpn. Thanks again and I'll be sure to report back further testing.

Mar 15, 2023 9:12 AM in response to MrHoffman

This is definitely not on the routing (external to the computer) end as a computer restart resolves the issue. Additionally, as mentioned, I can successfully ping various sites.


As for it being VPN, my local network is 192.168.10.0/23 and the vpn I use is split tunnel and only routes 10.2.0.0/16 and 10.4.0.0/16 networks. I'll have to keep it in mind to try seeing if disabling the VPN would fix the issue the next time it happens, but again, considering it only routes 10.x networks (ie, private only), can I can't see how that's an issue in getting pages to load in the browser.


One other thought I had is that a local web server loaded in the browser during that issue. This got me wondering, do browsers use alternate DNS servers for resolution/caching?

Mar 15, 2023 7:28 AM in response to Shareef Yousef

Are the wired and wireless connections using the same or different IP subnets? Different IP subnets would be typical, but maybe your router deals with this case itself.


First-few-hops VPNs are solving a problem that hasn’t existed for a while, and are not something I’d recommend. This differentiated from a VPN connecting into a remote internal network; a network for an organization you are affiliated with.

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Internet out, but network connections fine

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