Unable to connect post reboot after adding new hardware

[walking]

I shut down my proxmox server to install a new storage adapter in it in preparation of setting up a truenas core vm. In the bios I enabled pcie bifurcation to split one 16x slot into four x4 slots (and no other changes I can recall). The storage card currently has two pcie drives installed.

Upon restart there were no obvious errors, however I've been unable to reconnect to it on the ip address shown at the console (which remains unchanged) and it no longer appears on the network. The virtual machines and containers appear to be okay and accessible (thankfully my pfsense vm is still functioning). I believe I have restarted this server previously without issue, so I think this is a direct result of adding the new hardware.

**I suspect the hardware changes have resulted in some of my network interfaces getting new id's and I have to re-map the primary host interface to restore access. I just don't know *how* to accomplish that. From other posts I found a few commands to help gather some data. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction and maybe even advise how to avoid this situation in the future. Any help would be appreciated.

attached pics are output from:
ifquery -ac
ip a
nano /etc/network/interfaces

My server has two onboard ports plus a four port add-in card. PFSENSE uses the add-in card ports (for WAN and LAN) while the host is connected to my LAN switch via the top onboard port. My server acts as my router in this configuration.

 

[walking]

update:
I was able to restore access by modifying the network interfaces file
I changed all instances of enp5s0 with enp8s0, saved and rebooted
My educated guess is that when I enabled bifurcation on the x16 slot it shifted the network interface 'up' by 3 id's, due to the way the channels are allocated. Post issue it sort of makes sense.

Question: is there a way to prevent this in the future as I add or change hardware, or is it just a reality of the underlying OS (Debian?) that I need to be aware of?

This is not something I am used to having to manage manually in the Windows world (which does not seem to have this quirk) and it makes me nervous about making changes that might lead to this again. I would have thought a device would have a unique ID separate from the interface address that software could use...to avoid this scenario.
sort of like: slotID -> deviceID -> uniqueID -> aliasID's, such that the uniqueID and deviceID (for driver identification) would never change and software would reference the uniqueID to send or receive data. Sort of like a MAC address for network ports.