Replace hardware
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I want to move my pfSense to a new PC with new NICs. I will do a backup to config.xml of the old PC and restore it to the new PC. When I install pfSense on the new PC I will set up a WAN and LAN. I assume when I restore config.xml to the new PC it will associate the old PC's WAN to the new PC's WAN and do the same for the LAN. My question is…How do I deal with my other two NICs, EMAIL interface (opt1, xl1) and WIRELESS interface (opt2, xl2)? I realize the xl1 and xl2 will likely be different. These two interfaces are pretty much just LANs. Do I set them up using the same name/opt during the install and then the restore will associate the email/opt1 from the old PC to the email/opt1 on the new PC? Same for wireless/opt2?
Thanks for the help.
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If you know the device names of the various interfaces and you feel confident in editing config.xml then you can change the logical to physical device mapping by editing the saved config.xml before you restore it to the new hardware. Just be careful not to mindlessly search/replace - many of the short physical device name strings (re0, em1, vr2…) also appear randomly in long security keys surprisingly often.
Otherwise, when the system first boots it will ask you to assign interfaces. As well as answering for WAN and LAN you just need to keep going and answer for OPT1...
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Also it's a good idea to fill in the empty "MAC Address" field of each interface while still running on the old hardware, with the MAC addresses of the original interfaces.
When restoring config on the new hardware, the old MAC addresses will be kept and devices on your network will not realize that the gateway has been changed (Windows particularly, if detects MAC address change on the default gateway, prompts the users with a selection dialog, and defaults to "Public network" which can break certain functionality in some cases).
