"Interface mismatch" should preserve more configuration than it does

[deet]

I'd love it if pfSense could preserve interface configurations better when hardware changes.

After replacing a NIC in one of my firewalls over the weekend, it came back up with an Interface Mismatch and guided me through resetting the WAN and LAN interfaces.

Once that was done, all my other interfaces were gone as well… VLANs, tunnels, other NICs, everything.

I can back up and restore, of course, but it feels like I'm too far down the wrong path if I'm to the point of restoring the entire system from backups after changing hardware.

I'd love it if pfSense could capture its own configuration, sort out what might actually need to be reset, and leave everything else intact. Where VLANs and tunnels depend on a parent interface, there should be a way to re-map the virtual interfaces to the physical NIC. And in general, I'm not sure it's the best approach to have the system sit and wait for from-scratch reconfiguration in the event of a hardware change. When hardware's changing, it's all too often because things are going wrong, and this behavior just adds to the list of things going wrong. It could bring some joy to have pfSense do the proverbial right thing when hardware shifts around.

[gharris]

I agree that it would be awesome if it did that.  Loosing VLAN's and tunnels is pretty major, as are rules, aliases, etc.

As a work around, it's pretty simple to boot up, figure out what the new interface name is, edit the config file to replace the old interface name with the new, copy the config into place, reboot and roll along.  Generally it can be done in less than five minutes IF you expect it and have already figured out where the config file is and backed up before hand.