Default gateway lost after netif restart

[Alex Long]

I am new to FreeBSD so I apologize if this is the wrong place to post 
this.  But there is a flaw in the logic regarding restart of the netif 
service.  I understand that after restarting the netif service, you have 
to manually restart the routing service.  The problem is that if you are 
configuring a machine remotely and you have to restart the netif service 
for whatever reason, your defaut gateway is lost, thus preventing you 
from restarting the routing service and you lose connectivity to the 
machine.

Now I get around this by creating a shell script that does both and just 
executing that script.  This works but it is sloppy in my opinion.  It 
does not makes sense to restart a network service and lose ANY network 
functionality (i.e. your routes) once it comes back up.

Regards,
Alex Long