Help with VPN weirdness

[Elerek]

So I'm writing this on my desktop at home via remote desktop over vpn (connected to the local ip of my desktop) because I can't get to linustechtips.com or any other website besides google.com and facebook. com on my laptop over the vpn. 

The vpn is openvpn running on a linux box at home.

My phone can open any website while on the vpn, it's just my laptop with issues.

My laptop's network setting for the vpn have DNS set to 8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.4, I have also left it blank and gotten the same issue.

I also apparently cannot see file shares on my home network on my laptop.

If I open network devices on the laptop, I see nothing. If I open it on my desktop via vpn I see my phone which is also on the vpn, but not my laptop.

 

I have used the vpn before on my laptop without issue, but restarts have not fixed this

[Drseevee]

Hmmm. I sometimes overthink things and often it's a pesky firewall if not then try running some commands. (Windows I assume)

 

Ipconfig (to check you have a valid address/gateway/mask)

 

Ping x.x.x.x (where x.x.x.x is your router or other local address)

if successful then

ping 8.8.8.8

to see if you can reach a dns server/the big wide internet.

if that works then

ping lego.de (or any random site that won't be in your dnscache)

if you see something like pinging x.x.x.x which is an ip address then you have dns resolution. Or use nslookup

 

Tracert can be your friend. It can identify where something is going wrong.

 

Hopefully that will give you a start to help identify where the problem lies which can be half the battle in network troubleshooting.