[jwhite]

Hi folks,

We're having a good time in Duluth. We learned a few things about the Roborio and the new mDNS stuff the hard way. In hindsight, they're fairly obvious, but I thought I'd share our experience in the hope it saves someone else some of our puzzlement. (Nicely, the good FIRST people helped us figure it out in the practice rounds, so no Q round harmed).

We learned two things the hard way:

1. Once you get to the regional, and have the D-link configured, you are in bridge mode, and there is no DHCP server.

2. If you use static IPs, you *must* use a netmask of 255.0.0.0 or you won't work on the field.

Some subtleties of #1:
a. The mDNS stuff will keep working. But the Robo Rio and your windows laptop will use a 169.XXX address, and other devices (like our Axis camera and our Pi) will use the last leased address, in our case 10.28.23.X. So you won't be able to communicate in the Pit. Ironically, there is a dhcp server on the field, so you *will* be able to communicate on the field.
b. If you had the D-link assign a particular IP to a device, you lose that once the router is reconfigured. For example, we had the d-link give the axis a set address. The camera was still in DHCP mode, but it always got assigned .11. That meant we could keep using the basic smart dashboard widget, which only accepts a numeric IP address. Of course, that falls apart when you no longer have a DHCP server...

So the solution to #1 was to switch over to using static IPs. *It turns out that this is really easy*. Hit roborio-XXXX.local with a web browser, click on the network configuration, one easy choice, and you are done. (This presumes you're still good at doing static ips for your other devices).

The *catch* is that the default netmask the RoboRio will suggest is 255.255.0.0. That will work great in the pits, but the FMS requires a netmask of 255.0.0.0. (If you think about it, that's obvious :-/).

At any rate, I hope this helps someone else, and good luck to you all.

And a shout out to the Lake Superior staff for doing a great job of running a smooth week 1.

Cheers,

Jeremy