One thing drives me crazy since early versions of mtik. When changing wireless ot ethernet cards the software remembers which cards how were configured and here comes the problem - lets say i have fault in wireless card which i can access very hard (not to mention to bring monitor with me and keyboard) - what will be better - to swap and like in good old linux new card to take old one’s config or to find a way to enter the box remotely?
Please remove that stupid feature - IT DOESNT HELP AT ALL!
I wouldn’t say it this way - "it doesn’t help at all " is not the diplomatic way 
There are many situations where current attitude is right and there are situations, like your replacement, where your system would be more helpful. Probably there could be some command to take settings from current card, like /interface wireless copy-current-config for these cases. If there will be just one wireless card, the new one, automatically pass this config to is, if there are more cards, let the user choose which one should be copied and bind the configuration to new, unknown card like
copy-current-config wireless2 {will copy current config from wireless2 interface to new one}
or
copy-current-config enable=yes {copy the only config, because there is just one wireless present right now and it will be replaced. So this is likwe switch activation}
bye, mp3turbo.
What would be nice is if the router config kept a ‘ghost’ or ‘shadow’ entry for the missing card, and upon restart you could re-enable the missing entry replacing a new one that showed up. (or even just leave the old one there so you could at least modify rules without breaking things) The problem is that if you change NICs you lose all settings, rules, etc because the NIC entry is tied to the MAC address of the card. A simple change of the new card entry description to the old name doesn’t cut it.
Sam
mp3turbo2, i dont think there are any situations that require this :feature:. Anyway i’m waiting for replay from someone of the developers to take actions on this one.
BTW - if all of you think like me just write it here. Product gets better every day with users comments of course.
sorry i cant see the problem here?
support staff should have a notebook and a console cable. if the device is critical, out-of-band management via modem or terminal server is also a good solution.
a few terminal lines end everything’s working again…
(just my 2ct;-)
I too would like to see some sort of interface name retaining. There are two scenarios where this would save time and make it easier to upgrade/fix hardware. For example, on a device with 2 ethernet ports and one wireless card, ether1 ether2 wlan1 become ether3 ether 4 wlan2 when placed on a different board.
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It would be nice to do an install/config “at the office” then go out to the field with a batch of preconfigured cards and drop them into new devices. Currently, this doesn’t make sense as all the interface names change when put in the new device and they need to be reconfigured. This breaks wired and wireless interface functions, as well as hotspot.
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If an ethernet card or wireless card fails, again upon replacement all settings relating to an interface name have to be reconfigured.
I’ve been fighting this for many weeks…It would certainly save a lot of time if you’ve got tons of these installed. Some system setting along the lines of “don’t change interface names for different hardware” would be really helpful if such a feature were possible.
[quote=“mag”]sorry i cant see the problem here?
support staff should have a notebook and a console cable. if the device is critical, out-of-band management via modem or terminal server is also a good solution.
It is very hard to work with the notebook on a 20 meter tower (last week I change two radios . I would also prefer that the interface-name should not change.
Kind regards,
Horst
Think about this: Your machine dies. You unplug your flash drive (or hard disk) and place into a new machine with new nic cards. You bring up the new machine and wham, now your config is all hosed and you have to reconfigure to get it working. There is a lot tied to the NICs, all your firewall rules, etc.
Sam
ok, i see.
but i never had ether1 beeing disabled by changing hardware. could that happen?
You should save your config file, just like you would do with cisco or any other config, then you can edit it for the new router. You would still have a mess if we just put the config on the first, second, and third… interface found.
John
This is what I have done - so I am making backups as well as config backups. But it’s still a pain - you can’t just move one firmware to another machine and have it work without tweaking everything just because of the MAC ties.
Sam
but i never had ether1 beeing disabled by changing hardware. could that happen
No, but it gets renamed to ether2 (if only one is in use - or to the next available label). All things referencing ether1 break.
another thing is, that we use very similar hardware, which means that we actually can exchange firmware without problems.
but i guess its a generic problem using linux-based systems on standard pc-hardware, otherwise the hardware options would be quite restricted.