Help Me Understand What's Going On With This Interface

[smajor]

I've been using OpnSense for as long as I can remember. I have switched hardware a number of times. Today, I ran into something I've never seen and just can't figure out.

My current hardware has 3 interfaces: em0, em1, and em2.  Only em0 (LAN) and em1 (WAN) are used.

My drive has been having some issues reported by SMART, but otherwise everything has been working.  Today I decided to backup my configuration, put a new drive in and restore from backup.  Nothing I have not done before.

No WAN internet. After 2 hours combing over my config, on a lark I decided to reassign em2 as WAN and unassign em1.

Everything works perfectly with that change. I did nothing else. I have not tried swapping them back yet.

[bartjsmit]

Since your interfaces were all working before, I would check the physical connections that you plugged back in after working on the storage.

[smajor]

All were/are fine, link lights and all.  First thing I did when things went wrong, actually.

[Saarbremer]

Did you check the config file? You say your SDD/HDD died maybe the file was already broken when retrieved. However, I am not sure whether OPNsense's config importer would notice that (e.g. premature end of file)

[newsense]

All were/are fine, link lights and all.  First thing I did when things went wrong, actually.

If you can rule out physical issues (damaged cable / port) then it could be electrical if you weren't properly grounded when swapping drives.

If a battery is present you can try unplugging everything and taking out (even replacing) the battery, else simply leaving it unplugged a few minutes from everything - for all the capacitors to discharge - might suffice.