the way i see IT

I finally wrapped up a series of support calls with SonicWall for our Pro 2040.  For the last week and a half, my secondary WAN connection has been down.  I initially thought it was a Time Warner issue, but in no time I realized it was related to the Sonicwall.

What it finally boiled down to was no traffic could go out the X3 interface, which is our secondary WAN connection that we use for redundancy and load balancing.  After more than a week and every troubleshooting step under the sun, they finally determined (after lots of prompting from me) that the 2040 had a bad interface. 

Now granted, it was not a text book hardware problem.  But I kept telling them “I really think this is hardware related.”  They kept insisting we try more steps. Finally I decided to setup a different interface w/ the X3 settings.  Voila!  That solved it, and within minutes I had an RMA number and the new Pro 2040 will be here Monday morning.

I’ve included the tech support notes for your geeky pleasure.

On the WAN load balancing stats for x3 it shows: Link Up and load balancing state as failover, probe main and alternate target shows as target unavailable. Asked customer to remove the primary wan. Restart the Sonicwall and see if he was able to go online through the secondary WAN. Customer is unable to go online using the X3 interface of the Sonicwall. Bypassing the Sonicwall , he is able to go online using the ISP connection. Asked customer to disable the primary WAN and try to ping 4.2.2.2 from the Sonicwall interface. Wasnt able to. Asked customer to see if he was able to ping the WAN gateway. Wasnt able to. Restarted the cable modem. Still unable to go online. Sonicwall has the mac address of the upstream device, but unable to ping it. Laptop plugged into the cable modem is able to go online. Asked customer to use the laptops LAN mac as the Sonicwall WAN mac. Still unable to go online. Asked customer to disable load balancing and wan failover and see if he was able to go online from the secondary wan. Did a capture while asking customer to ping 4.2.2.2. Didn’t see anything in the capture. No custom routes added.

–Unable to find anything that could cause this type of issue with tests we have ran Submit case for escalation

X3 was working for internet connectivity in the past, currently unable to route internet traffic through X3 –Internet connection is a cable modem. With Sonicwall plugged in and assigned same or different ip information on X3 unable to route out, Sonicwall has ARP entry for upstream gateway but we are unable to ping the gateway from the Sonicwall and unable to route to the internet –Rolling back to 3.2.3.0 build does not help out at all, Brett was sure it worked without issues on this firmware version –Packet capture on pings from the outside show no traffic hitting the Sonicwalls WAN interface –ISP says everything checks out and they can see the Sonicwalls mac address –Cloning mac address for hosts that can plug directly into cable modem produces same results –Unable to find anything that could cause this type of issue with tests we have ran. Submit case for escalation

This case has been assigned to a Senior Technician.

-Pulled power on modem/sonicwall and powered up at the same time, no good -X3 worked fine for a year (timewarner cable/static) then upgraded to 4.0.0.2 and Brett noticed within a week that there was no traffic going out of the x3 any longer as probes kept failing -changed mtu/fragmented packet handling, no good -tried all link states, no good -reset modem, no good -when customer plugs a laptop into the modem with same settings, it works fine -pings from sonicwall to secondary default gateway shows arps going out of the x3 looking for the gateway but no response. -The gateways mac does show up in the arp cache -Tried configuring the x2 with the timewarner connection and it worked great -x3 is bad RMA