Well, it’s happened - I am currently dealing with my first iphone support request this morning. First observations are that the iphone is a lot heavier than I thought it would be and I’m told it gets very warm after a period of extended use. Also, the keyboard keys are a bit small for my big fingers. Not that that has anything to do with the support call of course. The device was very nippy in speed though and quite responsive. My two year old daughter would love it.

Anyway, on with the support request. After authorising the MAC address on the wireless network the user reported that Internet access was not working. Further investigation shows that email is working but Web access is reporting “Safari can’t open the page as the server can’t be found”.  Very little is being reported in the firewall logs but some experimentation has discovered that Web access is working using IP address - so the problem seems to be a DNS issue. The iphone has the correct DNS entries set (three of them!) but the traffic just isn’t getting through.

Even further investigation shows that the problem seems to be some issue between our Sonicwall Firewall and the iphone as connected to a different Wi-Fi access point works fine. The Sonicwall is working ok because I’m using it right now. I also found some tips by Andrew Escobar at http://andrewescobar.com/archive/2007/07/06/change-iphones-wi-fi-dns-settings-to-connect-to-the-internet/ but the problem remains. I’m still working on it and will update this post as and when I find some resolution.

 Update: The problem is now resolved - phew! Switching off IP header checksum enforcement on the firewall fixed the problem (IPS is still enabled so we are still safe).

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