Overdrive Pro (4G USB) working but issue with removal
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Scenario: Our phone lines were down (for about a week) due to the recent hurricane. I have a pay as you go device from Virgin Mobile, the "Overdrive Pro" that acts as a wifi hot spot and also has a USB tether option. I decided to set it up as a backup connection and to share out the device on my LAN using PFSense on my Alix 2D3 and the USB Port. [Note: The Overdrive Pro device is available from Sprint and I think a few other mobile 3g/4g vendors]
At first the interface wasn't accessible (hot plugged). However, after I rebooted PFSense, with the overdrive pro on and attached, it was detected as a new interface. I was then able to boot up, configure the interface in pfsense and enable it as a WAN gateway. When I had it working well, I set up my main DSL connection as the default gateway and made the Overdrive a backup connection following the various multi-wan guides.
Problem: I travel and didn't want to leave the overdrive pro forever tethered to the PFSense box so I thought I could unplug it and leave the configuration as is, expecting that when I plugged it back in all would be good again. And for a while, everything worked fine when I unplugged the device UNTIL I rebooted PFSense for another issue. At that time the system wasn't coming back up. Eventually I connected my serial port and used the terminal to determine pfsense was pausing during bootup because the interfaces had changed, and asking for direction. At that point I think I messed up further by trying to reconfigure the interfaces in the terminal screen and pretty much made things worse. I spent the better part of a day getting things back working with JUST my old DSL setup (Single WAN) and a LAN/WLAN bridged local connection.
Question (TL;DR): Is there a way to use a USB network card as a secondary WAN (on an ad-hoc basis) without having to manually reconfigure PFSense interfaces when it's physically connected/disconnected from the system hardware?
On a side note, the http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Known_Working_3G-4G_Modems wiki page may be able to be updated with the Siera Wireless Overdrive Pro as being a working 3g-4g modem (or maybe it already is but listed under a different name/chipset).
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It's not currently possible to keep it assigned and be able to unplug/plug it at will. We've had a few discussions about how to best handle that, and there is at least one open ticket covering some of the issues here http://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/593
