FreeBSD and Persistent Network Interface Names in VMware

Why vmx0, vmx1, vmx2 interface names sometimes cause fear?

Anyone running FreeBSD as a router or firewall in a virtualized environment knows this situation well: network interfaces are named vmx0, vmx1, vmx2, and critical configuration (pf, routing, jails) depends on them. A small change can suddenly turn WAN into LAN and LAN into DMZ.

On physical hardware this is a common problem. Adding a PCI card can change device enumeration order. In VMware, the situation is much better, but it is still important to understand how to make interface naming stable and future-proof. 

Using iperf3 and Prometheus for WAN link monitoring

I have multiple FreeBSD routers across my environments across the world each having its own WAN (Internet) connectivity and using WireGuard VPN to connect all into a private network. 

I would like to do

• local monitoring of Internet connectivity on each router
• centralized monitoring of Internet connectivity of each router in my datacenter 

The solution is pretty simple and I will describe it on this blog post.