Aruba access points, EAP, and wpa_supplicant 2.4 bugs

I stumbled upon a strange bug at work one day and found I couldn’t connect to our wireless access points any longer. After some investigation in the systemd journal, I found that my card associated with the access point but never went any further past that. It looked as if the authentication wasn’t ever taking place.

A quick dig through my recent dnf update history didn’t reveal much but then I found a tip from a coworker on an internal wiki that wpa_supplicant 2.4 has problems with certain Aruba wireless access points.

There’s an open ticket on the Red Hat Bugzilla about the issues in wpa_supplicant 2.4. The changelog for 2.4 is lengthy and it has plenty of mentions of EAP; Aruba’s preferred protocol on certain networks. One of those changes could be related. A formal support case¹ is open with Aruba as well.

If this bug affects you, you can return to wpa_supplicant-2.3-3.fc22.x86_64 easily by running:

dnf downgrade wpa_supplicant

This isn’t a good long-term solution, but it fixes the bug and gets you back online.