Windows 7 – Why do I get “General Failure” when pinging host name on a Win 7 node on the network?

This is a very peculiar problem with a station on our network.  The client pc is running Windows 7 Pro.  What makes this problem interesting is that this client is the only node on the network that seems to be experiencing this proglem.  When I try to ping a specific Win 08 server by host name, I get an IPv6 address and get General failure.  But when I ping it’s IPv4 address, it responds just fine.

My first thought would check the DNS server the name resolutions to see what would be going on, but the problem begs the quesion, why does the station get an IPv6 address back and fails as opposed to using the IPv4 settings (which are static btw).  What gives?  I am including a screen shot of trying the one specific server and failing while trying another server with success.  All other nodes on the network don’t have problems communicating with the server the one station is having issues with.Pingng: General Failure

Solution:

In my situation, I found peerblock caused this.

Some applications block http traffic, peerblock for example. These cause pings to fail via the “General Failure” error message.

The way I found the application causing this was to kill processes one by one and checking the pings. Eventually I killed peerblock in my case and my ping started working.

If your pings are failing only for a few sites it most likely Firewall, Antivirus or some other HTTP interception/blocking application like Peerblock, Charles, Wireshark… etc.