how to configure the IP/network settings?

[alexisdal]

first of all, thanks for making a simple ROS container. I'm working on windows and i struggle to understand the getting started procedure on Windows. A docker container feels just great, in particular the ability to jump from a ROS version to another.

It's probably my ignorance, but how should I configure my station to have a container that connects to my network environment so that the container can later connect to existing ros robots already present on my network? I typically I want to observe ros topics in rviz from the real robots.

right now it says

# ip a
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
    inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: sit0@NONE: <NOARP> mtu 1480 qdisc noop state DOWN group default qlen 1000
    link/sit 0.0.0.0 brd 0.0.0.0
8: eth0@if9: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP group default
    link/ether 02:42:ac:11:00:02 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff link-netnsid 0
    inet 172.17.0.2/16 brd 172.17.255.255 scope global eth0
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
#

and i need it to ask for a dhcp lease to my router so that it gets an ip 192.168.1.x ?

Any hints on how to get started ?

[Tiryoh]

@alexisdal Thanks for using GitHub Discussions!
I haven't used Docker on Windows recently, so I'll check it out.

[alexisdal]

@Tiryoh thanks.

for the record. by editing the .bashrc and changing the ROS_* environement variable inside the container like below:

#export ROS_IP=127.0.0.1
export ROS_IP=192.168.1.200
export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://$ROS_IP:11311

I can list ros topics from my robot (192.168.1.200).

However, when I actually try to read messages (rostopic echo or rostopic hz) then it does not work. I suspect this is because when I try to this the container is sending a request to the robot to push its messages to the container, and that's where it fails.

I wouldn't be surprised I need to create a macvlan on the docker container configuration
https://docs.docker.com/network/macvlan/
But i just don't know how to do it. I simply do not want to create a VirtualBox, fire a pre-made ubuntu desktop 20 image, install the entire ros-desktop environment => and then do the network configuration in virtualbox (this I know how to do it... in docker no)

maybe that can help ?

[Tiryoh]

@alexisdal Thanks, detailed information would be very helpful to investigate Docker on Windows. I'll check it out today.

By the way, do you use WSL2 for backend?
https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/wsl/

[Tiryoh]

I haven't been able to find a solution yet, but I found some important information that I would like to share.

According to the following page, the macvlan option works only on Linux.

The macvlan networking driver only works on Linux hosts, and is not supported on Docker Desktop for Mac, Docker Desktop for Windows, or Docker EE for Windows Server.

https://docs.docker.com/network/network-tutorial-macvlan/

It seems like that the transparent network driver is required on windows.

https://forums.docker.com/t/windows-10-place-container-directly-on-local-network/30247

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/container-networking/network-drivers-topologies