Ive noticed in some cases that when I swap out a PCI ethernet interface card (on a PC based machine), the MT OS loses track of interface names, as well as ip addressses, routes, etc associated with that interface. Obviously its difficult for the OS to make accurate assumptions about what name should go with what new interface (consider the example of removing a single port PCI card and installing a 4-port PCI card). Anyone else had this problem??
Perhaps marking unknown interfaces something other than ‘unknown’ would be beneficial so that users could re-name all related configuration to the new interface name.
EX: A PC-based router has 3 PCI single-port ethernet interfaces, named as follows:
PCI slot 1: world
PCI slot 2: internal
PCI slot 3: customers
If I remove the card from slot 2 and replace it with a 4-port PCI card, the OS cannot figure out which new ethernet port matches to which name as previously configures, so it names them as “unknown”. If the names were kept the same, and tagged in some way as no longer pointing to a valid name, it would allow the user to set up new interface names for the new ethernet ports, and then tell the config to transfer anything that was named X change to Y.
For configs that have few IPs and routes, its no big deal. I have 3 dozen IPs and many route statements as well on my router, so its difficult to recreate the entire config.
