Using the driver station in a virtual machine

[kd8rgp]

I am currently having issues with the driver station. I run Linux on all my machines, so I'm running the driver station from a windows 7 VM in Virtualbox. Unfortunately, the driver station is failing to connect to the robot at all. FYI, I am running the VM network in NAT mode, BRIDGED IS NOT AN OPTION.

Mostly, my question is: How do you get the driver station to work through a nat?

[irvingc]

Originally Posted by kd8rgp

I am currently having issues with the driver station. I run Linux on all my machines, so I'm running the driver station from a windows 7 VM in Virtualbox. Unfortunately, the driver station is failing to connect to the robot at all. FYI, I am running the VM network in NAT mode, BRIDGED IS NOT AN OPTION.

Mostly, my question is: How do you get the driver station to work through a nat?

You probably can't. The driver station and robot are supposed to be on the same subnet. You might be able to get a 255.255.255.252 subnet mask to work with some wonky NAT settings (robot is 10.XX.XX.2 -> 10.XX.XX.0/30, and DS is .5 or .6 -> 10.XX.XX.4/30), but getting the network configuration just right seems like much more trouble than running it through Wine, finding another laptop (any old laptop will do), or dual-booting.

[Nirvash]

Why is bridged not an option?

[kd8rgp]

Originally Posted by Nirvash

Why is bridged not an option?

Kernel Issues

[Greg McKaskle]

The DS uses UDP for all communication and ICMP for diagnostic pings. The dashboard, if using camera or smart dashboard will use TCP as well.

If your NAT'd address is routable to the subnet of the DS and robot, I'd imagine this will work. But NAT implementations vary quite a lot and you are rather customized here. I hope this isn't what you were going to use for your competition DS.

Greg McKaskle