i’ve seen this a few times on vista with a wireless connection. you’re clearly connected to an AP, you have an IP address, you can ping the gateway…but you can’t get out on the internet. hence “local access only”.

i encountered it just recently again and after some lazy troubleshooting i ended up blaming it on early releases of vista. so i then installed SP2, figuring that would resolve the problem. it didn’t! so then i figured i should put more thought into this. i tried all sorts of things…

• recreating the wireless connection profile
• unchecking IPv6 for the connection
• changing between private and public network
• letting windows auto-resolve the problem
• hard disabling IPv6
• deleting the wireless NIC drivers and reinstalling new ones
• setting a static IP, saving settings, reenabling DHCP
• turning off power saving settings for the wireless NIC
• disabling/reenabling the wireless NIC

none of that worked. ridiculous hmm? some of those were suggestions from forums. there were more drastic suggestions too that i didn’t bother to try. i was starting to get obsessed in finding a solution at this point.

finally, a post in a forum pointed me in the right direction. something evilly simple and stupid.

from network and sharing center > internet options > connections > lan settings > checkbox automatically detect settings.

that’s all the problem was in this case. writing it down so that i remember now.