FRC Driver Station does not save config INI

Technical Technical Discussion
#1

I am the lead software mentor for our FRC team. I’ve been a software engineer for years and am pretty well versed in Windows permissions.

I have several laptops our team is using. I was able to configure our driver station laptop so it automatically opens the new java dashboard.

We have also done this on one of the programmer’s personal laptops and it works just fine.

I am trying to configure my laptop running Windows 10 (like the other 2 laptops) to use the new java dashboard and I am unable to do so because the FRC Driver Station app will not create the ds data storage.ini file in the C:\Users\Public\Documents\FRC folder.

My problem is exactly as described in this post https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=133631&highlight=driver+station+ini
and I agree that it would appear to be a permissions issue however here is the situation:

I am the only user on the laptop and my account is a system admin.
I am running the app as Administrator
I have given everyone full permissions on the Public folder (and checked that the acls were propagated to the sub folders.)

I uninstalled all of the NI software and reinstalled it this morning thinking this might be the issue however, this didn’t help at all. It still does the exact same thing. Whenever I start the driver station software, it loads goes to the default settings and when I close it, it does not create the ini file. :confused:

Any suggestions anyone has would be greatly appreciated. I would like to be able to help the team figure out how to communicate with the new java dashboard but I can’t do anything on my laptop until I can get the driver station to save the config ini.

#2

Can you put the .ini file there manually?

#3

It does not seem to read it for whatever reason. :confused:

#4

Process Monitor might tell you what’s going wrong

#5

Are you running any restrictive group policies?
Turned off all the protective utilities, e.g., firewall, Defender, anti-virus, 3rd party management s/w, etc.?
Something is restricting read/write to that directory.

#6

No, while this is my work laptop, I work from home and it isn’t joined to a domain or anything. The only permissions applied on the laptop are what I have applied to it and I haven’t messed with permissions other than granting some from time to time. It’s a pretty vanilla install of Win 10. It was upgraded from Windows 8.1 if that gives anyone any ideas. :slight_smile:

I’ll take a look with process monitor and see if that can tell me anything.
Thanks for the suggestion!

#7

So, after digging through Process Monitor data for quite a while and looking through all of my Event logs, I’m no closer to a solution than before. I don’t find anything in the process manager log from when I shut down the app or start it indicating there was a failure reading a file or registry key and I don’t see anywhere that it is actually trying to write the file when the app closes and being denied permissions. This is just really frustrating.

I’ll probably take another crack at a process monitor log today at our meeting to see if I can get lucky.

#8

Does Process Monitor have anything for FRC DS Data Storage.ini?
Eg, set up your filters like this

#9

Yeah I did a bunch of filtering and there are no entries for the FRC DS Data Storage.ini file.

DriverStation.ini
servers.ini
LabVIEWSSLConfiguration.ini
TargetInfo.ini
DNCInterface 160.ini
NationalInstruments.LabVIEW160.ini
ni-rt.ini

Not the data storage one though. It writes to my user folder but nothing to the public one where the DS Data storage file should be.

[Album] ProcMon results
#10

Ok, how about just a link to the pic.

#11

Try filtering all DriverStation.exe I/O failures (not just ini but for all files, registry entries, etc)

#12

I have tried filtering all kinds of different ways and looked through tons of entries and nothing jumps out as to being the source of this issue. :confused:

#13

Could you send me the full log of DriverStation from Process Monitor? (ie, open procmon, add only a filter for DriverStation.exe, then start DS)

#14

Thanks for your efforts to help. :slight_smile:

You can download the monitor log from here

#15

I’m very curious to understand what may be preventing the ini file from being written on your laptop.

In the meantime, if you hand edit the ini file to point to your DB, does that work? Can the DS read from the ini file?

Let me know if you need help with the syntax or values.

Greg McKaskle

#16

Greg, I copied the 2 ini files from the other laptop I have where it is working correctly and put them in the C:\Users\Public\Documents\FRC folder and when I start the program it starts up with default settings. No team number, loads the default dashboard.

#17

I’m still not having any luck. :confused: Anyone else have any suggestions?

#18

Kinda reaching here, but do you have User Account Control (UAC) fully disabled? If not, disable it, reboot and see if that changed anything.

#19

That wasn’t a bad idea. :slight_smile: Sadly, it didn’t fix the issue. Thanks for the suggestion though!

#20

At this point, if you’re willing to reinstall Windows entirely, you could try that