MAC-address independent network configuration possible?

[cp42]

Hi all,

if pfSense detects different network card(s) with different MAC addresses while booting it stops and asks for configuration. Is it possible to change this behaviour, i.e. make it work anyway instead?

Background: I've installed pfSense in a VMware virtual machine, which is backup up by Veeam and should be tested afterwards by Veeam's "SureBackup" feature. This SureBackup starts the saved VMs directly from the backup storage in a "virtual lab" which is isolated from the productive network to check if the VM starts and runs really as it should in case of a desaster. Quite cool. The problem is that VMs in this isolated virtual lab always get MAC addresses which are different from the original ones in the production network, so when the network functionality of a VM depends on a certain MAC address then those SureBackup tests must fail for this VM. The problem occurs with Linux as well, but there's a simple workaround available for the udev system. I'm looking for such a workaround for pfSense now…
Thanks for reading!

Regards
Christoph

[Crunk_Bass]

Have you tried setting the MAC address of the VM to manual instead of automatic?
I didn't test it myself but might be worth a try.

[cp42]

Please forget about my post. I must admit that I was completely mislead by my experience with Linux machines complaining about changed MAC addresses.  :

Meanwhile I recognized that pfSense contrary to Linux doesn't bother at all about changed MAC addresses and that the problem with the SureBackup testing of my pfSense VM had been caused by a configuration error of SureBackup's virtual lab, which emerged only with this single VM (out of 58 VMs which are tested) and made this VM boot up with only one NIC instead of three - so the prompt for network configuration made perfect sense. The problem is solved now.
Thanks for your feedback!

Regards
Christoph