NetworkManager was recently updated in Fedora 8. The newest version now works well again with a specific but widely used enterprise encryption method.
One of the major regressions in Fedora 8 was that the new NetworkManager was not working with a specific encryption method used by the European Eduroam (wlan) project. This network uses a certificate based TKIP-TTLS-PAP encryption system to allow or deny access to wireless university networks across Europe and is therefore at home at almost all larger universities in Europe (and Australia, btw.).
The proper solution to handle that situation was to configure wpa_supplicant manually or to run other tools or home-made scripts.
Two days ago, after more than two months, an update of libnl required a rebuild of NetworkManager and libdhcp as well. And with these updates, the login works again without any further problem.
It is not entirely clear why the bug is now fixed but it looks like the libnl package had some serious problems which might have caused the problem. I hope that NetworkManager soon reaches a state were all promised 0.7-features are available – and where I have a KDE gui to configure them 🙂
While the issue is solved the bug itself raises some valid questions: If the bug hit all Eduroam users, which are mostly students or academic people which have a high percentage of Linux users, why did so few people care? Is it because most European users don’t use Fedora but Opensuse, Mandriva or Ubuntu which all did not ship that specific NetwokManager version?
Or did the system work for most people and failed only for some odd reason for me and a couple of others? Strange in any case.