Erroneous "No Internet Access" warning in Windows 7

[jcoehoorn]

On our Windows 7 (and maybe Vista) computers, there is a small overlay on the network notifications in the system tray. It's a yellow triangle with an exclamation point in it. When mousing over this I can see information about the current network connections that contains the phrase "No internet access". This warning is just plain untrue - I'm using such a connection to type this very post. I don't see the same warning at home.

As I think about how this might be implemented, it almost has to be that the computer actually goes out and makes a request of some internet resource provided by Microsoft to see if it responds. Could untangle be blocking this request? If so, does anyone know details of how to allow it?

[sky-knight]

It's an HTTP request that goes against microsoft.com. And it's buggy... I've seen that message come and go over the time I've used any router... I wish I could just turn it off.

[hescominsoon]

SK has this one correct. if you see that icon and the inet works fine ignore it.

[jcoehoorn]

See - I can ignore it just fine. It's my users I'm thinking about here. After the crashing we had a couple weeks ago they see that and just think it's down again. And it's annoying because it shows so consistently on campus but I don't see it at all at home. Maybe it's an isp issue (the college has a dedicated fiber line via time warner), but whatever it is I'd like to fix it.

[fasttech]

In my experience, it's definitely not specific to Untangle.

Actually, speaking from experience, I see it less from Vista, Win7 from behind UT than 'other' distros.

[sky-knight]

Yeah... I hear you there on the user perception. I've run into that in my own home, my wife sees that error and tells me the internet is down. I then rather grumpily ask her to open a browser and prove it, which then gets her the web site she wants... and she sits there scratching her head.

I don't think it's you at all. We're talking about a web server in Microsoft's datacenter that's being asked to respond to a given HTTP request at random intervals from every Vista / Windows 7 / Server 2008 server installation on the planet. Heck I think the XBOX's do the same stupid thing.

Get enough people pinging a single point and it falls over. I honestly think some engineer at Microsoft didn't think that one through enough. With as many problems as we get from windows update alone, you'd think Microsoft would be intelligent enough to not build in such a weak system. They didn't even bother to go so far as to check multiple URLs, all the test needs to do is verify an HTTP response from a random web site. They could have put in some fail back links to google, yahoo, or the MSN cluster... but NOOOO.

[jcoehoorn]

... or even documented the process. If it were documented, we could have a system like untangle intercept the requests and provide a nicer response.