5.3 Release Notes

the auditctl program, which is used to control the behavior of the audit subsystem, now supports multiple keys in the audit rules.

a new utility, ausyscall, which is used to cross-reference syscall name and number information, is now provided in these updated packages.

the aureport program has been enhanced to provide reports about keys it sees in audit events.

event log parsing for the ausearch and aureport programs has been improved.

a sample STIG rules file, named "stig.rules", is newly provided in these updated packages. This file contains the auditctl rules which are loaded whenever the audit daemon is started by init scripts.

Support for a D-Bus control interface has been added. D-Bus is a popular lightweight Inter-Process Communication mechanism, and the addition of this control interface to wpa_supplicant allows applications (like NetworkManager) to more reliably control the supplicant.

Cisco Aironet 340/350 wireless cards were not able to successfully connect to 802.1x-enabled wireless networks, often used in security sensitive organizations. During the connection process at the 4-Way WPA handshake stage, sending encryption keys to the driver would clear the wireless card firmware's authentication state. With this update, the supplicant uses an alternate method of supplying encryption keys to the kernel driver, allowing authentication state to be preserved in the Aironet firmware and 802.1x connections to succeed.

Kernel drivers utilizing the new mac80211 wireless stack were sometimes unable to connect to wireless networks, either failing to find the requested network, or prematurely ending communication with the wireless access point during the connection process. Some drivers were prone to reporting multiple disconnection events during the association process, confusing the supplicant and causing long timeouts. The supplicant also did not sufficiently instruct the driver to disconnect when switching access points. This update fixes these issues and, in conjunction with kernel driver updates, allow more wireless hardware to successfully connect to wireless networks.

NetworkManager would not display a LEAP password, even when the user selected the "show password" option. This has been fixed through a rebase to NetworkManager 0.7.

During the beta phase, a version of NetworkManager was unable to automatically start network interfaces for which "ONBOOT=no" was present in the ifcfg file. NetworkManager now ignores this value unless "NM_RESPECT_ONBOOT=yes" is also present.

a NetworkManager plug-in was named for its upstream repository. This could cause end-users to mistake the plug-in for an un-supported addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This plug-in has been renamed to "ifcfg-rh".

with this update, support has been added to NetworkManager for wired 802.1x authentication. However, after creating an 802.1x-enabled wired connection in the NetworkManager connection editor, it may be necessary to log out, then log back in before the connection can be used from the NetworkManager applet menu.

NetworkManager attempted to set a hostname, but only after X had already done so. The user could not then open new windows because the authority files had been set by X with a different hostname. NetworkManager no longer sets hostnames.

an update for NetworkManager that was available in the beta phase would change the run level enablement of the package during installation, and thus prevent NetworkManager from starting. NetworkManager no longer changes run level enablements during installation.

on a system with more than one network adapter, network keys saved by the user while connecting with one adapter would not be available when the user attempted to connect with the other adapter. NetworkManager can now retrieve and use network keys saved for a different adapter on the same network.

previously, NetworkManager would not always prompt the user for a new network key if the protocol or key of a wireless network changed. Although NetworkManager would wait for a new key, it would not always open a dialog box and allow the user to provide one. NetworkManager will now open a dialog box when needed.

several bug fixes and enhancements for NetworkManager were available upstream. NetworkManager has been rebased to version 0.7 to incorporate these improvements, including mobile broadband functionality, Phase2 WPA support, and static IP functionality.

NetworkManager would would cause a segmentation fault when resuming a session. This was caused by the HAL dropping privileges before connecting to D-Bus, meaning that the HAL could not send signals to NetworkManager. NetworkManager now explicitly permits signals from the HAL.

sometimes, X would freeze if the NetworkManager menu and a keyring manager window were open at the same time. This updated package includes a patch from upstream that prevents this behavior.

if NetworkManager requires a network key from the user, it will open a pop-up window. However, the applet previously could not steal focus from metacity and would remain in the background. The window was therefore not obvious to the user. The applet now opens in the foreground, alerting the user to take action.

when resuming, NetworkManager could sometimes re-establish a wireless connection, but not a route. A fix for this problem from upstream has been included in this update.

NetworkManager did not previously support Cisco Airo Wi-Fi cards, as these devices did not respond to NetworkManager's attempts to detect them. NetworkManager can now detect and use these cards.

the NetworkManager applet would wake up and redraw its icon once per second, even when NetworkManager was not active. Now, the applet will not wake up unless NetworkManager is running.

NetworkManager 0.7 connects faster than libnotify can provide a notification bubble. When this happens, the bubble will appear at the top left corner of the screen, rather than under the taskbar. NetworkManager notification bubbles are now delayed for a few seconds, allowing libnotify to react.

cleanup of the DBusGProxy objects treated pending remote method calls incorrectly and may have resulted in freeing invalid memory. Consequently, processes using DBusGProxy objects may have crashed when the DBusGProxy object was freed. With this update dbus-glib correctly handles the destruction of DBusGProxy objects, resolving this issue.

two new function calls, dbus_g_proxy_call_with_timeout and dbus_g_proxy_begin_call_with_timeout, have been added to dbus-glib providing the ability to specify a timeout when making a request to a remote service.

dbus-binding-tool now ignores namespaced Extensible Markup Language (XML) nodes when processing introspection definition files.