i’ve created my own wifi router & firewall using pci passthrough for the network card to a kvm/libvirt/qemu virtual machine running pfsense hosted on an ubuntu server and it works well enough; but the pci id changes roughly every other reboot.

i was thinking of adding another hack in the form of a bash script to launch the vm and then modify the virtual machine’s xml if there’s a problem and then attempt another relaunch; but this entire exercise has taught me the hard way that hack-on-top-of-hack-on-top-of-hack is impossible to remember and there will come a point where something will break and i’ll spend a couple of days relearning how to build my own router again.

any advice on how to make it all more mindless and/or graceful?