WSL Troubleshooting

Posted 1 December 2020. 3 min read.

Introduction

This document is written in our company in order to solve the issues with WSL2, CheckPoint VPN and other self-hosted services. You're welcome to suggest more fixes in this subject to make this document more general.

Network and DNS Troubleshooting

Try each command by their order to better find the correct problem.

Try ping 8.8.8.8

If it failed it means that you don’t have an internet connection at all.

See this video and/or [WSL2] Checkpoint VPN breaks network connectivity (comment) to solve this issue.

Probably the base thing is to connect to the VPN before WSL2 Network Adapter.

  1. Open your WSL Terminal.
  2. Disconnect from the VPN (if connected)
  3. Disable the WSL2 Network Adapter by netsh interface set interface "vEthernet (WSL)" disable or by Get-NetAdapter -Name "vEthernet (WSL)" | Disable-NetAdapter
  4. Please make sure it disabled by $(Get-NetAdapter -Name "vEthernet (WSL)").Status is Disabled
  5. Connect to the VPN
  6. Enable the WSL2 Network Adapter by netsh interface set interface "vEthernet (WSL)" enable or Get-NetAdapter -Name "vEthernet (WSL)" | Enable-NetAdapter
  7. Validate the ping 8.8.8.8 in WSL again.

Try ping google.com

If it failed it means that you have a problem with the DNS. You need to update the /etc/resolve.conf with your DNS addresses.

Run this command in PowerShell: Get-DnsClientServerAddress -AddressFamily IPv4 | Select-Object -ExpandPropert ServerAddresses, then take the addresses from that command, clear the resolve.conf file and set the first line search {your domain} and then the next line will be nameserver {ip}.

Source: you can use this script (from Networking issues while using VPN (comment)) to auto-update the resolve.conf.

Try ping {internalIP}

If it failed it means that you have a problem with the VPN.

Try ping {internal hostname}

If it failed it means that you have a problem with the internal DNS.
Make sure you configured the DNS by the instructions in 2.

Other connection issues

Clone a git repo by SSH

If you’re trying to clone a private repo, you need your credentials that usually configured in the Windows system.

My suggestion is to use SSH, here is an instruction to configure the SSH keys in TFS:

  • Create an SSH key in WSL with ssh-keygen -C [email protected], and paste the ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub in {tfs-host}/tfs/_details/security/keys

  • If you are getting an error with diffie-hellman-group1-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1 (I don’t remember the original error), create/edit the ~/.ssh/config file with:

    Host tfs2018app
    KexAlgorithms diffie-hellman-group1-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1
  • Get the SSH repository URL.
  • Clone.

You can try to use the Windows Git Credential Manager with/instead of using SSH, and share the consequences in this document.

npm network timeout

If you are getting the next error when you are trying to use npm, please share the solution with us:

npm ERR! network timeout at: https://registry.npmjs.org/@babel/plugin-proposal-optional-catch-binding/-/plugin-proposal-optional-catch-binding-7.10.4.tgz

You can try this:

  • run Get-NetIPInterface on windows to find MTU value for VPN network adapter (mine was 1350)
  • run sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1350 or sudo ip link set dev eth0 mtu 1350 inside WSL to match eth0 MTU value with vpn network adapter value
# WSL
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