IPFire Network Interface Not Found

Today I'd like to talk about IPFire and a problem I had recently with the network cards.

IPFire is my favourite lightweight firewall distribution. It's easy to setup and configure which, in my opinion, makes it perfect for labs and POCs.

I have a lab environment set up on my Windows 10 computer with multiple virtual networks and virtual machines. I have setup a virtual network with Active Directory domain controllers acting as DCHP and DNS servers, several test servers and workstations. I have even joined an Ubuntu Server to this Active Directory Domain.

All these in a private virtual network... So I had to make internet connection available to those machines. I created a new virtual machine and installed IPFire. I added three virtual network adapters to the virtual machine - one connected to my LAN and the other two connected to two private virtual networks.

After a little bit of configuration, my virtual machines could access the internet through the IPFire virtual machine.

The only problem I had was when I moved the virtual machine to another host for another lab. The virtual network adapters were not configured with static MAC addresses so when IPFire started, it could not find the NICs.

This is very easy to fix, just take a note of the MAC addresses of the adapters in Hyper-V and the network they're connected to and then update the /var/ipfire/ethernet/settings file with the new MAC addresses. Be very careful here and set the right MAC address for the right adapter. Reboot the VM and you should be all set.

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