Monday, January 9, 2017

Google not working with Sonicwall only in Chrome

Out of nowhere, we started having problems on multiple computers in which Chrome Browser (in Windows 10) was unable to connect to Google.  Chrome could not access Google, and it seemed that ANY website that uses a Google API or Google Product, such as Google Adwords was also not able to load or was very slow to load in Chrome Browser.

The error seemed to be similar to DNS issues, where attempting to access Google.com in Chrome or attempting to search from the Chrome search bar directly would sporadically return an error similar to a dns issue where you can't find the website.  But, the abnormally long load times on websites that had other google services, such as adwords is not typically a symptom of bad DNS.

Oddly enough, the same exact search or website access in a browser other than Chrome, on the same computer, would work perfectly fine.  Google works in edge or firefox, but not in chrome.

I tried a variety of online help articles, including clearing the cache, uninstalling chrome and reinstalling chrome, deleting and adding the gmail user back in, but nothing worked until the following:

Open Chrome

Type "chrome://flags/" in the Address bar and hit Enter.

You will see "Careful, these experiment may bite" on top and some Warning Text. Ignore it.

Hold Ctrl and hit F (Ctrl + F) key on your keyboard for the Find Box to Pop up.

Type or Copy paste "Experimental QUIC protocol" in the find box to find what we need.

Now, From the Drop Down menu, Select Disabled.

Close Chrome Browser and Launch it again.

 Our environment includes Windows 10, Sonicwall NSA4600 Firewall, Chrome and AVG Enterprise.  I suspect that the Issue relies in the IPS settings of Sonicwall, but was not able to prove that out.  Regardless, the above solution seemed to fix our problems with Chrome being unable to access Google services.