Feature #593
closed
Preserve interface assignments based on last MAC address (possibly optionally)
Added by Erik Fonnesbeck almost 14 years ago.
Updated almost 8 years ago.
Description
Some have requested to have the ability to automatically detect when the name of an interface has changed, based on the MAC address, and change the name in the configuration to match if necessary (particularly for USB devices). This could be optional, but there may be no harm in always doing it every boot without needing to be enabled by some option.
This shouldn't be too difficult to implement, but it needs to be performed early enough at boot and needs to handle every setting that uses the actual interface names.
One thing to watch out for if this is implemented is that the MAC address can probably only be reliably determined at boot, since it does not seem possible to determine the old MAC address on an interface after overriding, as far as I know.
Please do not do such thing since you will break pfSense in big blows.
VLANs share the same mac and so do the clones on wireless and possibly other devices do this too.
cloned interfaces might not have a mac address at all so you have to find different method to identify them.
For USB you can use the bus id and number to identify them.
If I even implement this myself, I do not intend to do it anytime soon (which is why I set no target version). My intention was just to mention various ideas.
Whatever way it would be identified, by MAC address or anything else, it would need to distinguish between the actual interface and virtual interfaces in some way, even renaming some virtual interfaces in the configuration where necessary. It would also need to change the configuration for any virtual interfaces that are using the real name of the interface in the configuration file.
- Status changed from New to Closed
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Updated by Ermal Luçi 
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