Need to reboot driver station PC to ping mDNS alias

We have encountered a strange issue where we find that we must reboot the Driver Station computer (running Windows) in order to connect to the Rio. This is something we found necessary whenever we cycled power on the RIO. We noticed that we are unable to ping the mDNS alias if we do not do so. We tried last year’s radio and did not have this issue. We also tried other computers and did not have this issue. We suspect that the driver station computer is running last year’s version of the mDNS responder. Documentation indicates that there were “tweaks” to the 2016 mDNS responder. Does anyone know further about the tweaks other than the mDNS alias contains a -FRC.local?

Before you reboot, did you notice whether the ethernet link lights are on? I found that a Lenovo computer tended to come up without link. I found that it was fixed by Disabling and Enabling the LAN interface from the control panel.

The mDNSResponder didn’t change, or at least not by much. But the use of it did slightly. The -FRC on the end of the device name is to avoid one feature of mDNS that occasionally incremented the team number. Another was to avoid a race condition where multiple service types were reporting in the same packet.

Please post back with any other observations.
Greg McKaskle