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October 16, 2006
Editing Profiles in the Gnome 'network-admin' Tool
The network-admin tool that comes with Gnome has a handy feature that allows you to store "profiles" or "locations" which specify the name of the network and the WEP key for different places where you use wireless. This is great.
The problem is, the interface for this tool is completely counterintuitive. I have, for some time now, had several "locations" which were configured completely backward. This turns out to be because you aren't supposed to set profiles up in the way that I would expect. That is, I would think you should 1) create a new profile 2) configure the profile 3) save the profile. In fact, you have to 1) configure your network settings 2) create a profile. If you don't know this beforehand (and I have no idea how you would know this) then you're screwed -- you can't edit profiles from the tool; it doesn't remember any changes you make after the profile is created.
Your best bet is probably to delete your broken profiles and create new, correct ones. But if you've found your way here through Google, you're probably like me and that solution is just too stupid for you. In that case, I have for you the XML file which contains these profiles. It is here:
/etc/gnome-system-tools/network/profiles.xml
The entries are completely straightforward, and can be edited/renamed without any problem.
While I'm griping, it would be nice if these files were documented somewhere easier to find. To figure out which file to edit, I had to resort to adding a new profile and then executing
sudo find / -amin -1and sifting through a long list of recently-accessed files.
Posted by todd at October 16, 2006 10:38 AM
Comments
Great explanation, thank you! I was wondering whole the time, what is the user interface logic of this strange tool? I found this gnome tool unusable for editing profiles and discovered this profiles.xml and was editing it with a simple text editor since than.
I am using the tool only for choosing profile. But it takes pretty long, at least 30 seconds, for applying the changes. And sometimes the tool hangs and I loose the network connection. Then I have to kill the tool and repair the networking with sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart and sudo dhclient.
Posted by: Vladimir Dobriakov at October 29, 2006 1:34 PM
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