pfSense

Can I protest against this change? I upgraded to 2.4 and so far this is the only change that is really causing me a lot of grief. On systems with many interfaces/VLANs this should count as a regression, it makes it quite a lot harder to spot the interface you are looking for.

Instead of removing the perfectly-working sort on the head.inc interfaces menu, why can't we move in the other direction as Robi suggests and make the rest of the menus adopt the same sort order. I disagree with Steve's comment that leaving the list unsorted has any merit.

+1 for making the interfaces list sorted alphabetically by their DESCRIPTION (NAME) defined in /interfaces.php.

This is not just about aesthetics. There are many situations where interfaces with similar purposes are added at different times, this causes a mess. For example you have a WAN from the beginning, that's somewhere at the beginning of thelist, but after some time you get multiple wans, you add a new interface, that will be at the end of the list. When you have 20 or more interfaces, it drives you nuts to find the various WANs mixed between so many LANs. There are events when new temporary interfaces are needed, and I name them like GUEST_1, GUEST_2 and so on, WORK_1, WORK_2 etc. and unless these interfaces are created immediately one after the other aplhabetically, they will be all mangled in a big mess. (for example if I create GUEST_1, WORK_1, WAN2, WORK_2, GUEST_2 in this order, they will not be alphabetical anymore). Moreover, if I reuse some older OPT interface instead of creating a new one, that will stick somewhere in the middle.

Even worse, if I create VPNs and assign interfaces to each leg, mess will become even bigger. It would be logical if I could simply call them VPN_SITE1, VPN_SITE2, VPN_SITE3 etc they would at least grouped next to each other. WAN1 and WAN2 the same, LAN_1, LAN_2 etc the same.

This order needs to be kept everywhere where interfaces are listed by their description.

robi robi wrote:

+1 for making the interfaces list sorted alphabetically by their DESCRIPTION (NAME) defined in /interfaces.php.

+1 from us, too. I'd like that everywhere but on the interface assignment page. Especially in the Firewall/Rules dropdown that shows up when there are more interfaces than can be displayed as tabs.

This is not just about aesthetics. There are many situations where interfaces with similar purposes are added at different times, this causes a mess. For example you have a WAN from the beginning, that's somewhere at the beginning of thelist, but after some time you get multiple wans, you add a new interface, that will be at the end of the list. When you have 20 or more interfaces, it drives you nuts to find the various WANs mixed between so many LANs. There are events when new temporary interfaces are needed, and I name them like GUEST_1, GUEST_2 and so on, WORK_1, WORK_2 etc. and unless these interfaces are created immediately one after the other aplhabetically, they will be all mangled in a big mess. (for example if I create GUEST_1, WORK_1, WAN2, WORK_2, GUEST_2 in this order, they will not be alphabetical anymore). Moreover, if I reuse some older OPT interface instead of creating a new one, that will stick somewhere in the middle.
Even worse, if I create VPNs and assign interfaces to each leg, mess will become even bigger. It would be logical if I could simply call them VPN_SITE1, VPN_SITE2, VPN_SITE3 etc they would at least grouped next to each other. WAN1 and WAN2 the same, LAN_1, LAN_2 etc the same.

Dito. Our datacenter cluster ATM has around 25-30 interfaces already and will get more than double that size. I'm already fearing how the Interfaces menu will scale with so many entries, but not having those interfaces sorted (we name them v{VLANID}_{Project}, e.g. v123_infra or v201_cust01) would be really bad for finding the right one fast. Adding VPN interfaces to the mix and chaos is complete ;)

This order needs to be kept everywhere where interfaces are listed by their description.

agreed. I can see people with ~3-6 interfaces not wanting to sort, so for that case I'd recommend some sort of UI switch to have it sorted or not. Perhaps even on a "User setting" basis. Just our 0.02$
If anything like that'll happen or get committed to test we'd be very willing to check and help.

Greets

Erm, people, it's already done, the sorting is back.

Thank you guys for taking this into account. It works well, much better to use now!
May I ask for one last thing? The widget in the dashboard is still unsorted...

It works in master 2.4, but it never got backported to RELENG_2_3 or RELENG_2_3_4.
This was the PR in master: https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/pull/3685

Backports now in PRs:
RELENG_2_3 https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/pull/3774
RELENG_2_3_4 https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/pull/3775