Loopback interfaces revisited

owczi · Aug 3, 2016, 11:34 PM

Once upon a time there was this thread: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=63653.msg358902#msg358902

Either pfSense users do not typically do serious routing and focus on firewall functions, or, I don't know what, but I find it mind-boggling that there is still no support for user-defined loopback interfaces.

Is there really zero demand for this? How can you do proper IGP-backed BGP and advanced tunneling without custom loopbacks?

I am wondering how much effort it would take to add a "loopbacks" tab in the interfaces section where you would create them, and then allow assigning IPs to them. My workaround for many years now has been a dummy VLAN subinterface with a /32 assigned to it. Actually a bit more. I create a dummy GRE tunnel on that dummy subinterface from self to self and that is my loopback (so that the loopback doesn't live on a physical port). Never an issue with it, but this is a hack. Maybe it's time to call a bounty.