Or would this trivial patch just hide a more serious problem?
Paul Bolle
I believe it would. It is the administrator's job to adjust these permissions if he/she wants to allow non privileged users to control hardware. A silent denial would hide the remedy to this problem IMO.
There may be another problem here though... You mentioned that this error occurs when using the GUI. You should be prompted by consolehelher for the root password before the GUI is presented. I assume here that you are invoking redhat-config-network.
Is this the case?
Mike Avery