I just got done upgrading a laptop from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 9. Unfortunately, my Wifi iinterface is a lot better, but the networking is much more difficult out of the box.
I normally operate the laptop in 3 different modes:
1) Connected via a cat 5 cable to my in house network.
2) Connected via Wifi to my IPCop firewall, with IPSec turned on to route everything to the firewall and then from it to the world and to my internal networks.
3) As a Wifi road warrior using OpenVPN to get to my internal networks from elsewhere.
Problems:
1) I know I can turn off Network Manager with chkconfig, but without doing that, the Wifi keeps on coming up and ethernet is turned off.
2) Even though I've got the firewall disabled, Network Manager seems to turn on the firewall, without the Gnome firewall control panel showing it.
This has taken me quite a few hours to figure out.
It would be very nice if I could define my 3 normal configurations and switch between them at will. In other words ethernet only, Wifi with IPSec VPN turned on, and Wifi, OpenVPN plus firewall on.