NET-X 003: Blocking the Network Utilities category

Have you ever had no internet but had internet?

Today, I was tasked to deploy a Quantum Spark Checkpoint firewall. Everything went smoothly, well, until this bad boy showed up:

The laptop I used to provision the firewall appliance showed No Internet Connection and had me confused, because I got to the Internet! Could I be feeding off another source? Nope. No Wi-Fi, no secondary NIC, nothing.

You may have stumbled upon a scenario where your network is up but you don't have internet, but it's not every day you see a network being down but still being able to access YouTube. This confused me, it's something I've never seen.

THE (LUCKY) RESOLUTION

So, like any other networking guy; I went through the OSI model to see what's up:

(I skip a lot of layers :D)

 I pinged the default gateway - passed

 I checked all open port connections - looked good

 I checked the newly provisioned firewall for any logs that could indicate the issue - nothing

I was so confused and kept looking into anything that the firewall could be doing. But luckily, due to some issues, I had to check our Meraki dashboard and behold: could not load the page.

Then I reviewed the firewall policies again and found that this traffic matched a hit on the policy that blocked Network Utilities. 

It then came to me... wait.. Network Utilities... does that block the Network service of Windows?

Removed the policy that blocked that category and everything went back to normal. 

Shoutout to the guy who had some issues with Meraki, would have taken me longer to figure this out.

- Patrick