Wireless Networking Problems

[Greg McKaskle]

I'll try to review how the DS manages IPs, but there are so many configurations, that it may be necessary for you to describe which NICs you are using and additional routers and such.

On startup, the DS uses its ini settings to identify one wired and one wireless NIC that it may be controlling. Unless a NIC is set to be manually controlled, the DS compares the current IP with the one computed from the team number. If they do not match, it will ADD the IP being computed. The computed NIC for wired and wireless differ in the last byte, 5 and 9 I believe.

The ADD behavior is new this year. If a NIC is set to DHCP and a new IP is added, the resulting NIC configuration has only one IP assigned. If the NIC was already manually assigned, the resulting configuration will have two NICs. This can be seen with ipconfig or using the Advanced button in the IPv4 properties dialog.

A few other points. If the Setup>>NIC button is used to change NIC, the computed IP is deleted from the old and added to the new. If the team number is changed, the old computed address is deleted from the NICs and the new is added.

The DS for last season SET the IP. This season it uses ADD and DELETE in the hopes that it would allow a computer to be used for FRC DS without being dedicated for it. Since DHCP is so common, in most cases, nothing is changed. If you are making manual IP assignments, but have not set the NIC to manual, you will wind up with multiple IPs assigned. At this point, I'm not sure whether add/delete was an improvement.

Greg McKaskle