Yup. Mind you, this is the hard way of going about this. In most cases, if you're in an area with no aura nearby this is either because either Thaumcraft was installed sometime later, after some of the world was explored, or something bad has happened and some of the aura nodes corrupted and removed, which seems to happen a lot in SMP. If you are playing in SSP or if you are the admin or can talk to the admin, in SMP the better way to go about it is altering the Thaumcraft config file to regenerate the aura, which should fix the problem.