PC restart required every time bot is restarted

[Greg McKaskle]

I haven't seen it this year, but one of the bugs that we weren't able to make much progress on was when the multicast group was not up to date. So the mDNS calls return normally, but return cached results. I was watching the TCP traffic and could tell that the discovery was not going over the wire.

I believe that if you fiddle with the laptop networking enough, it will connect without requiring a reboot. Specifically, when Windows decides it needs to update the multicast group, the mDNS call will suddenly find the device that was connected the whole time. I was never able to find a way to flush or rebuild that info.

If anyone has amazing Windows networking ninja skills and knows how to force this, please chime in.

Greg McKaskle

[rrossbach]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

I haven't seen it this year, but one of the bugs that we weren't able to make much progress on was when the multicast group was not up to date. So the mDNS calls return normally, but return cached results. I was watching the TCP traffic and could tell that the discovery was not going over the wire.

I believe that if you fiddle with the laptop networking enough, it will connect without requiring a reboot. Specifically, when Windows decides it needs to update the multicast group, the mDNS call will suddenly find the device that was connected the whole time. I was never able to find a way to flush or rebuild that info.

Other than a full PC reboot, disabling and re-enabling the network adapter consistently resolves the problem whenever I see it. Presumably that forces the multicast group update.

I've not been able to resolve the problem just using "ipconfig /flushdns"

Hope this helps!

EDIT: sorry, neglected to also mention that when I've seen the problem, other networking apps all work fine....I'm able to ping roborio-XXXX-frc from the command line, able to ssh into it with PuTTY, etc

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by rrossbach

Other than a full PC reboot, disabling and re-enabling the network adapter consistently resolves the problem whenever I see it.

With a single exception, that's my experience as well.

The one case where the disable/reenable didn't work for me was with a particular USB-to-Ethernet adapter. It seemed not to take ANY changes to the device's properties until it was unplugged and reconnected to a different USB port, which ALWAYS triggered a reinstall of the driver. I think the team eventually gave up on that piece of hardware and used a loaner Classmate to run their Driver Station for the rest of the event.

[priderobotics]

Thanks everyone for your replies! I haven't checked this thread for a few days, and it looks like we now we have a BUNCH of things we can try this afternoon at practice.

We will re-post with an update of what works and what doesn't.

[priderobotics]

SOLVED: Disabling and enabling the network adapter works consistently on both of our Windows 8.1 HP laptops. Special thanks, rrossbach and Alan Anderson!

Things that didn't work:

• ipconfig /flushdns
• restarting "NI mDNS Responder Service" and all dependent services
• restarting DS
• every possible sequence of the above

THANK YOU ALL for your replies. I'm just super-pumped that I don't have to restart the computer every time we restart the bot now.