Can connect, but cannot ping

[Mich]

My wife is sick and needs to be able to VPN to the office. She cannot and her tech gave her the, "Don't know" answer.

Here's what is going on, she cannot connect to the VPN address. What's weird about this is that she can log onto the company's website, but cannot ping it. For example, I can bring up the site company.com, but cannot ping company.com.

Any ideas why I cannot ping the address?

-If it ain't broke, break it and make it better.

 

[PCmad]

Quick test for you, are you able to get external websites for example a site you haven't been to for a while? This will prove whether you have an internet connection first of all for VPN to work. The company page might be cached hence why is coming up.

Also try pinging a website for example ping

http://www.microsoft.com

does it ping ? If not likely no internet connection test again with pinging another website to make sure its not the website at fault.

When you wife tries to connect what happens ? Is there an error message, page cannot be displayed, please can you list full details, if you just said it doesn't work to the tech I doubt you will get a good response !!

Do you have a firewall on the machine that could be preventing access, do you need to open a port to get access to the VPN, what connection are you on wireless lan router/hub, usb modem ?

Sorry you need a lot more information to be able to help on this as we do not know the setup of your machine or how you get VPN access, software used, operating system, IE version the list goes on !!

 

[Davetoo]

Ping's don't always work...the site could have those ports turned off or telling them to ignore that traffic. You can't ping my VPN box, but you can connect to it.

The errors you're getting when you try to connect are what we need.

I'm Certifiable, not cert-ified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

 

[Mich]

I do have an internet connection; I can ping everything except this particular site; my wife gets an error message "cannot connect to ....com" and that's it; techs are paid to find answers an not provide crappy answers (I know I used to be one); this message is posted in the XP forum; IE 6 SP2

Let's remove VPN from the equation. Why is it that I can connect to a website, but I cannot ping the web address?? The only thing I can think of is that ICMP is blocked, but that would defeat VPN so I'm lost here. This is a company with thousands of VPN users. If VPN was screwed a lot of people would be screaming. This means the problem is local, but I cannot figure it out.

-If it ain't broke, break it and make it better.

 

[Davetoo]

Why would blocking ICMP defeat the VPN? My ICMP is turned off on my VPN concentrator, but my users connect all day long. The two aren't related.

Is your ISP, for whatever reason, blocking VPN traffic perhaps?

I'm Certifiable, not cert-ified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

 

[PCmad]

A few other things basic things, has the tech checked the VPN account ie, its not locked, expired, is setup correctly, they should also be able to tell you the last time you logged in successfully. Can you try from another machine at all if this is an option?

Try using Tracert to see if it brings up any clues as to where its could be timing out on websites. Disable firewall just for a small period of time to rule this out as causing any sort of issue.

I also agree with the comment made by Davetoo ISP's can block VPN traffic, if you don't rule this out you could go round in a circle forever!

 

[linney]

Have you tried to Ping from any other computer to the workplace?