Conflicting hostnames and NT topics

[samfreund]

Conflicting hostnames and NT topics are being generated by having the same host name on different coprocs, or the same camera name on different coprocs.

In the former case, this leads to camera feeds switching on driver dashboards.

HOSTNAME:

PV should check if the actual hostname is the same as the configured one. If it's not, warn and prompt the user to change it to something unique.

CAMERA NAMES:

Check if there are multiple publishers to a given topic (the topic being the camera name). If there are, warn and prompt to rename.

[samfreund]

This will be implemented by publishing the hostname and camera names for each coprocessor to NT with a key of the coprocessor's MAC address. Then if a conflict is found - either with host names or camera names - the user will be warned to change the conflicting name(s) with a persistent banner.

[Gold856]

We discussed the possibility of multiple NICs causing multiple MAC addresses to be available, but the consensus is that is an unsupported configuration or only one NIC should be active at a time. Potentially out of scope for this issue, but once we start publishing MAC addresses, we can then publish coprocessor specific info like hardware metrics or time sync data to those topics.

One important piece of functionality we want to keep is PhotonCamera only requiring the name of the camera. Users should not have to worry about which coprocessor a camera is connected to, only the camera name. The warning banners mentioned will be considered sufficient for users to manually fix conflicts should they arise.