[Greg McKaskle]

When you believe that either IP assignment or mDNS are failing, what type of network connection is it? USB, ethernet, or wifi? I use USB more than the others just because of how I set my stuff up. The team uses wifi almost exclusively -- except for the times when the OpenMesh made a bad channel choice and plays the retransmission game.

It would be good to get a sense of whether this is more common to direct tethered ethernet and self-assigned IPs, or to situations when the OpenMesh is involved.

I'll change my habits and use one of the other laptops to see if I can see this happen. Meanwhile, if you get in this situation, please use a command window and ipconfig to see if your laptop IP makes sense (DHCP should give out addresses above 20 I'm pretty sure, and when the OpenMesh isn't involved, the ethernet should be 169.254.xx.xx. The USB should always be 172.22.11.1.

Also, if you get in this situation, one thing to try is to shutdown other interfaces. Try shutting down wifi to see if direct ethernet works.

And of course, please post things that seem to help.
Greg McKaskle