SysAdmins' Chronicles

If you are building a firewall/NAT/Snort box and you want/need to rename the interfaces from the device names themselves it can easily be done in FreeBSD.

Edit your /etc/rc.conf file

ifconfig_rl0_name="internal"
ifconfig_rl1_name="external"
ifconfig_rl2_name="DMZ"

ifconfig_rl0="inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0"
ifconfig_rl1="dhcp"
ifconfig_rl2="192.168.0.1"

The above is just a simple example of a three interface firewall that has a DMZ network for servers and a internal network for all NAT'd machines.