[Aaron.Graeve]

Not a robot problem, but I think it's still interesting.

Lone Star this year (I was FTAA). One robot refused to connect to the Driver Station, and the Driver Station refused to connect to FMS. As it was practice day, we were willing to take extra time and figure out what the issue was.

The first time this team come up to play, they had an odd configuration issue on the Driver Station laptop which seemed to preclude connection to the FMS. We sent CSA's with them after the match to help them do a clean install of the Driver Station on a new laptop and thought that was the end of it.

The second time they came to play, the same issue occurred on the new laptop (lack of FMS connection to the DS). Curious what the the issue was, we tried using one of the Spare Parts Classmates as the Driver Station as those are basically bare-bones installs and should always work. No dice. That Classmate worked fine as the DS for the two alliance members, but failed horribly for that team.

Fast forward 30 minutes, still no progress. We have re-run FMS pre-start at least 4 times; the 5 other robots come up fine, but this Driver Station and robot refuse to budge. The team is understandably panicking that they may not be able to compete at all. As a shot in the dark, I turn to the FTA and ask if the Field could be getting a 10.41.*.* IP address from the convention center. As it turns out, the field was getting a 10.41.255.* address with a subnet that conflicted with the 10.41.55.* addresses that the team needed to use.

5 minutes later, the problem is resolved and both of the teams laptops are working fine. The Field exterior IP address is usually checked during setup day for possible conflicts, but must have been missed for some reason. The team was extremely grateful for the resolution and was patient and helpful the entire time.

TL;DR: A 1 in ~650,000 chance that the FMS wants your IP as its IP.