Well ok,
not quite, but it certainly made my day to day working life a little bit
easier. Welcome to my blog. This is my first Conchango blog
entry. Time is always short these
days so what better to open than with a great time saver - the QuickSet Location
Profiler.
Life as a consultant means constantly moving between office, client site and
home. This is part of the daily routine; it comes with the job and is
something I love. Each location has its own network and each network has its
own nuances. Logging on via a LAN or VPN
and having to set up shares and proxy settings was becoming a little
tiresome. Enter the latest version of Dell's QuickSet. I installed version 7.1.8 for the Latitude D610.
Among the numerous useful features of this application is the Location
Profiler. The Profiler allows you to configure your machine's network connectivity
with any number of "profiles".
A profile is defined by any
combination of the following:
- Network Shares
- Network Default Gateway
ip address
- Proxy server ip
- Default Printers
- VPN connections
- Run specified
executables
- Firewall settings
The
killer feature for me is the Automatic Profile Switching. Activating this
will allow the application to apply the correct profile, and all it's settings
automatically whenever it a newtork connection is made and it detects a configured Default Gateway.
To do this, simply add the network's Default Gateway and click Modify Settings and the select the Automatic radio button under Profile Switching.
The
Default Gateway can be determined by executing ipconfig on the command
line (while connected to the network) or by asking the newtwork's
Infrastructure team. In the screen shot above you will see that the
default gatway is 22.31.5.254.
When Quickset identifies a change of Default Gatway it automatically switches the profile and then simply informs you that it has changed. When I logged on a home tonight I got this popup:
This
simple little application saves me time every day and these days I don't seem to have
much time at all.