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I have a home network and access a desktop computer from my laptop (both Win 10) using Remote Desktop. This is using an internal IP 192.168.0.XXX. Most of the time it works fine but a few times a day I cannot connect or the connection drops getting the standard Remote Desktop connection error. From the laptop if I ping the desktop IP no packets go thru. If I ping the desktop using either the external IP or DDNS host name it works fine. Note I do have port forwarding set up in my Asus RT-AC68U router to access the desktop from the outside world. I can ping the other clients on the network fine just not the desktop. Whats weird is from the desktop window on the laptop I can ping the other network devices just fine. Access directly from the desktop works all of the time too. It is not a laptop issue as my iPhone 6 can't ping the desktop either but can the other devices on the wifi network. This has me totally stumped.

What could cause this? I have tried rebooting the laptop, desktop and router but only time solves the problem. Even when I can connect via Remote Desktop ping does not go thru. Could this be a loopback problem? I do run the latest Merlin firmware in the router.

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When you say you can ping your external IP, this is likely just pinging your WAN device, in this case your Asus router. It doesn't mean your router is able to access the desktop, or that you are necessarily pinging your desktop okay from outside of your network.

It sounds like, for some reason, your desktop is losing its network connectivity. It's hard to say exactly what may be causing this, but as every other device on your internal network is unable to ping it at the same time, it seems the most likely cause.

Are you able to get a connection out from the physical machine when you notice this problem? Are you able to ping the desktop ever? Have you definitely assigned the desktop a static IP (Wondering if it possibly changes to a different IP address if you have a particularly short DHCP lease)? Any software firewalls, including the Windows one, that may be misbehaving?

As said, the ping test externally will help you isolate whether your network is still connected to the internet, but it won't help find machines internally on your network. I would troubleshoot by monitoring the connection on the desktop machine locally, seeing if I lost network connectivity at any point, and testing remote desktop within the network until I know that is completely stable, before re-introducing the external element to it.

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  • I can get out from the physical machine all of the time. Pinging the desktop does work sometimes too, so it is sporadic. I do have it set to a static address since it needs to be accessible from outside the network. I have Windows firewall disabled as I use Bitdefender but even disabled that when testing with no change.
    – balcy24
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 6:28
  • @balcy24 Are you able to remote desktop from another machine internally? Really there are too many variables here to give a very direct answer. I'm fairly confident it's some aspect of your desktop causing the issue though, from what you've said so far.
    – Jonno
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 6:31
  • I can remote desktop in from my iPhone using a RD app except when it wont connect from the laptop so it does seem like a network connection issue.The physical machine runs 24x7 with an online game running in the background. That connection rarely if ever drops. I do have a gigabit network card I can install to see if that fixes the issue. Right now it is connected to a network port off my Asus motherboard.
    – balcy24
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 6:42

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