Making Fundamental Configuration Changes in ProfileUnity

I was working with one of my ProfileUnity customers and they decided that they wanted to change the file server for their user profile repository.  This path gets used in a lot of different places of a configuration.  The easiest way to change it in the GUI is to just create a new configuration (using the wizard) and specify the new file server.  In this case, that wasn’t really an option as they had a very developed configuration with a lot of customized settings that we didn’t want to recreate.  Fortunately, there’s a nice easy work around to make such changes.

 From the main ProfileUnity page, just download your configuration.  Instead of saving it as an .ini (like you would when transferring it into your domain\netlogin\ProfileUnity folder, export it as a .json file.  This .json file is ultimately just a text file… which means that you can open it up in your text editor of choice and use “find and replace” to great effect.

 When doing this, bear in mind that the backslash has special meaning for .json files, and so each backslash in a path is and must be first preceded by another backslash in order to tell it to ignore that special meaning.  So, if the path to your file server looks like this:

 \\lab-dc1b.lab.local\users\%username%

 You’ll have to enter it like this (both for finding the existing instances and for entering the new path):

 \\\\lab-dc1b.lab.local\\users\\%username%

 So when doing a “find and replace”, you’ll want to find this:

 \\\\OLD-SERVER\\users\\%username%

 And replace it with this:

 \\\\NEW-SERVER\\users\\%username%

 Then, simply delete the existing configuration and import the changed version from your .json file.  Now, you can save the .ini and upload it to your usual domain\netlogin\ProfileUnity folder, then you’re good to go!

 So, why not edit the .ini file directly, you ask?  Well, you could... but then you'd be stuck making those edits on every .ini file that you save from the system, as the system itself isn't aware of the changes that you've made.  By exporting the config, changing it, and re-importing it, you can reflect those changes in the system itself and so make them "official".

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