Connections 

Always get the latest Huddo version in HCL Connections  

By Wannes Rams | 1/26/23 3:09 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams

We have documented how to connect to our version, but that documentation is focused on a manual install of Component pack and connecting to our systems from the start. I want to show how to do it if Boards is already installed and running using the automation scripts. You can obviously follow this guide if you did a manual install and connected to the HCL resources, I am just mentioning some specifics about the HCL automation you can ignore.

The state of Social Business continued – Meetup  

By Femke Goedhart | 1/25/23 4:14 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams

The last HCL Ambassadors meetup we did last December had a bit of an open end and therefor we would like to continue where we left off: With the state of social business and the position of HCL Connection in it. Join us and let us know!

Certificate Information tool   

By Fredrik Norling | 1/17/23 2:40 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

SSL certificates, SAML certificates, Signing certificates the number is long of different kinds of certificates and you might need to check the name of a certificate, the start or end date or perhaps the thumbprint. I use the tool mainly to get end dates of certificates sent to me from customers because I hate when they expire and need to be changed without any preparation. And the worst kind that most administrators often miss is the certificates that is auto created i.e. in ADFS servers, Azure Enterprise apps, Okta

HCL Connections Docs 2.0.2 High CPU load  

By Urs Meli | 1/12/23 9:32 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams

We noticed on at least 2 environments, that the CPU load was around 100%, Memory usage 100% and Swap used 100%. Prior to the update, the servers ran happily and did not show any issues. The process list (htop) showed a lot of /opt/libreoffice7.2/program/soffice.bin tasks.

Keycloak and Kerberos  

By Urs Meli | 1/12/23 9:29 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams

Goal: Login to your Windows Client and do not have to login to Connections Motivation: Sure you can configure SPNEGO directly in WebSphere. But you might want to support OTP/WebAuthn for external users which are not in your AD?

Migration issue on opnact when using dbt.jar  

By Wannes Rams | 1/10/23 9:59 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

While I was migrating a Connections 7 on premises customer to our cloud using the dbt.jar tool, I came across the issue that the OPNACT database did not want to migrate, it threw an error on the OA_NODE table stating that the source table has 38 columns and the target one 37 The column that did not exist on the target was OWNERMEMBERUUID Now the target database is a fresh cnx7 created database from the cnx7 scripts and the creation script does not contain this column. So I started looking through the database scripts to check what happened to that column over time.

How to perform a db2 redirected restore  

By Wannes Rams | 1/10/23 9:58 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Sometimes you need to restore db2 databases on a different machine. For example during on prem to cloud migrations, or when moving database servers during an upgrade for Connections. In most cases some of the paths will be different. The LOGPATH is gonna be your main issue. Goal of this post is to show you how to restore the database and change the LOGPATH setting inside the database you are restoring on the fly.

Huddo Boards & Minio problems – Read before you restart!  

By Martijn de Jong | 11/21/22 2:06 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Last week I got the unpleasant surprise of a no longer working Huddo Boards for Component pack installation at a customer after I had rebooted my Kubernetes environment. I had to reboot this environment after I updated the Kubernetes certificates. Of course, after a change you immediately think that your problem is related to the change you just made, but in this case the only relation was with the restart, which means that this can happen to everyone running Huddo/Kudos Boards for Component pack or Huddo Boards Docker.

Update Elasticsearch certificates in Componentpack · stoeps  

By Christoph Stoettner | 9/5/22 2:04 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Elasticsearch in HCL Connections Componentpack is secured with Searchguard and needs certificates to work properly. These certificates are generated by bootstrap during the initial container deployment with helm. These certificates are valid for 10 years (chain_ca.pem) or 2 years (elasticsearch*.pem) and stored in the Kubernetes secrets elasticsearch-secret, elasticsearch-7-secret. So when your HCL Connections deployment is running for 2 years, the certficates stop working. The documentation on bootstrap is a little bit misleading and my suggested update does not make it into a technote or documentation update since nearly one year.

Change spellchecking to hunspell in TinyMCE  

By Christoph Stoettner | 7/13/22 1:54 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

The last years I had issues with application servers using large amount of CPU and even hanging application servers running the Tiny Spellchecking service. It ended with disabled spellchecking in the Tiny editors config.js. Now after updating to the actual editor version TinyMCE 5.10.2 we decided to reenable the spellchecker and the first days it looked like, that the issue was really fixed. Sadly after about a week the first application server started to use 800% CPU just for the server hosting the spelling service.

Fix some annoyances with Customizer · stoeps  

By Christoph Stoettner | 7/6/22 5:06 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Matteo Bisi

I created a git repository with some smaller CSS files to fix some annoyances within HCL Connections. I started with this to prevent Orient Me to load fonts from external URLs or Elasticsearch Metrics to break the UI on larger screens. These issues are solved after the last updates I got from support, but Blogs and Tailored Experience Wizard can be improved with some simple rules.

Restart Orient Me pods after Internal Server Error  

By Christoph Stoettner | 7/4/22 4:59 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

After rebooting the Kubernetes server for HCL Connections Componentpack, I sometimes see that Orient Me is not working and just shows: {"error":{"statusCode":500,"message":"Internal Server Error"}} I think one of the liveness checks could be improved, but for now the following commands restart just the necessary amount of pods to get Orient Me back running.

Elasticsearch7 Update  

By Christoph Stoettner | 6/8/22 3:56 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

CVE-2021-44228 was a very serious problem end of 2021, and we are still finding new occurrences, or security teams scan servers and find vulnerable log4j files. Don’t get me wrong most of these occurrences are not vulnerable any more, because the JVM is hardened like in the Elasticsearch 7 containers, or they use of the JVM parameter -Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true.

K8s Certificate Manager with Let’s Encrypt  

By Daniel Nashed | 5/5/22 4:41 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Domino certificate manager works like a charm and is the best option for native Domino 12 certificate management. But in a K8s environment you might want to better have certificates deployed outside Domino in front of your Domino K8s service. Mostly you will use a so called Ingress controller, which offloads your TLS traffic. I took a look into https://cert-manager.io/docs/concepts/certificate last night. It turned out the issues I ran into only occurred because of a messed up k3s installation. After I re-created my server, I was ready to go in minutes.

Automatic Lock/unlock on opening files  

By Femke Goedhart | 5/1/22 2:59 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

HCL released a new version of the HCL Connections desktop plugins last month (March 23rd 2022) that included a new feature: auto locking. Now back in the day when we still had CCM, the automatic prompt to checkout a file or not on opening was a great thing and sorely missed on the normal personal and community files. There, you had to manually lock and unlock each file when opening and closing them if you wanted to prevent others from working on the files simultaneously. So suggestions were made and requests sent in by multiple people. And with the March 2022 release it was finally implemented. There is now the option to be prompted to lock a file on opening it.

HCL Connections 7.0 : how fix possible issue on side by side database migration with dbt.jar for Wikis,Files and Metrics db  

By Matteo Bisi | 4/28/22 4:57 PM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Oliver Busse

In this period I'm working on HCL Connections migrations from 6.0 to 7.0 and I'm using the side by side approach. While I'm during this job, I prefer to use the dbt.jar for database migrations because this could help me to identify and fix issue at db schema level. In this migrations I had some issue with Wikis, Files (the same for both db) and Metrics

To Doc or not to Doc… Global ambassadors call   

By Femke Goedhart | 3/25/22 4:28 PM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Oliver Busse

This months edition of the global super users / ambassadors call we will be kicking off with the theme of To Doc or not to Doc… Do you use Docs with your HCL Connections or not? And why? What options are there and what are the needs for collaborative (and simultaneous) document editing?

Disable Highlights App in Connections 7  

By Christoph Stoettner | 3/23/22 4:08 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Today I got the question of how to disable the highlights app in Connections 7. When you follow the documentation for Connections 6.0CR6 you get an error message (and the document is not available in Connections 7). I commented out the widget definition in widgets-config.xml like described in the documentation for the former release. Sychronize the nodes Restart the application server hosting WidgetContainer and Communities Application Now create a new community and you will get one of the following errors

Add offset to community overview anchor links  

By Christoph Stoettner | 3/22/22 2:58 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Our users are often building Highlights and Overview pages within HCL Connections Communities, where they link from one description widget to RTE or from one RTE widget to another. We found that these anchor links often disappear behind the top navigation bar and the users wonder what happened.

Kubernetes – Host Entries   

By Milan Matejic | 3/18/22 3:22 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

As Kubernetes pods do not make use of the Kubernetes nodes/hosts "host" file (/etc/hosts), which can be a challenge or a blessing, do not despair if you find yourself in an environment in which some DNS entries are missing. There is an easy workaround to "get you going".

HCL Connections – Orient Me “Loop”  

By Milan Matejic | 3/17/22 12:55 PM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

After deploying Orient Me, every try to open the new Orient Me homepage would result in a "loop", the user was being redirected from the Orient Me (/social) page to the Homepage application (/homepage) and back again to the Orient Me page. The root cause for the problem was not a bug or an error in the HCL Connections code, but rather the configuration of the HCL Connections Blue Stack and other components in the IT landscape of this environment.

HCL Connections CP – Enabling Elasticsearch Metrics  

By Milan Matejic | 3/16/22 3:50 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Recently, when enabling Elasticsearch metrics, I ran into an issue with the "config_blue_metrics.py" script. Which was failing every time I tried to run it . After looking into the WebSphere Metrics Application logs, “AppsCluster” if your HCL Connections Blue Stack environment is installed as a “Medium deployment”, I’ve noticed the following error: [10/3/22 17:26:54:477 IST] 0000016c LotusConnecti E Unable to access the required data javax.servlet.ServletException: java.io.FileNotFoundException: SRVE0190E: File not found: /configsetter ....

HCL Connections: Get the owners of all Communities  

By Rainer Brandl | 3/11/22 10:18 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Today I had the request to get the owners of all existing communities. Based on the very helpful blog entry from Martijn de Jong I modified the SQL statement a little bit and received the needed information in a very nice way.

Videostreaming in HCL Connections  

By Christoph Stoettner | 3/7/22 10:50 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

In late 2021 I had an HCL Connections environment starting swapping, because the AppCluster used more than 30 GB of memory. The system has two nodes is installed with the medium-sized deployment option About 7500 users with a high adoption rate, because Connections is also used as intranet

HCL Connections 7.0 - CFix.70.2202 released  

By Matteo Bisi | 3/2/22 3:22 PM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Oliver Busse

HCL some days ago has released the last and greatest update of 2022 for Connections 7.0, named CFix.70.2202 that will brings the release of your Connections to v7.0.0.0 build IC7.0_Integration_20220216-1736.

KB: PushNotification broken after upgrading to CFix.65CR1.2201  

By Christoph Stoettner | 2/28/22 2:26 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Yesterday I updated a Connections environment to the latest CFix. In other environments I found that PushNotification Cluster was not started after the update, like described in the knowledge base document PushNotification broken after upgrading to CFix.65CR1.2201 . In this update the application and cluster were running, but not working at all. Browser console.log showed the error: Error connecting to push auth sync service /servic/info: RequestError: Unable to load https://cnx-fqdn/push/service/info status: 500

Change the Connections editor on the fly  

By Christoph Stoettner | 2/23/22 12:29 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

When I test topics with the different Connections editors (CKEditor, Textbox.io and TinyMCE), I always used multiple users in my test environment, installed the editor selector ear and then gave each of the test users a different editor. That’s easy with the different j2ee roles, but I always had to use multiple browsers or sandboxes to see them next to each other. During a support call with Tiny and HCL I learned, that you can switch the editor with a URL parameter. So no need to change the configuration or use the tinyeditorselector.ear.

HCL Connections PDF Export – Lesson learned  

By Rainer Brandl | 2/2/22 2:06 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Last week I had the issue that the new feature of exporting Wiki entries as PDF was not working although I finished all the Post installation task ( https://bit.ly/3rYnYPc ).When trying to access either the "ACL site" ( /ic360/ui/admin/acls.html ) or the SelfTest page ( /ic360/ui/selftest.html ) I always received the error that I'm not authorized to access those pages:

Patch Orient Me Container  

By Christoph Stoettner | 1/17/22 3:08 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

I wrote about font loading from external CDN in the post Hiding The Create Community Button 2nd last year and hoped this is finally fixed for all Connections applications. A good summary on the reasons to not allow external font loading is Blocking Web Fonts for Speed and Privacy So I checked with a Connections 7 deployment with the latest CFix (CFix.70.2112) deployed, if this is still an issue with Connections. In former Connections' versions we found external fonts loaded in Orient Me (/social), Communities Catalog (/communities) and the Admin panel (/cnxadmin/).

Installing Tivoli/Security Directory Integrator on RHEL 8ì  

By Martijn de Jong | 1/14/22 11:21 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

On a new SDI 7.2 installation (with Java 8 and the latest Connections TDISOL directory for Java 8), I ran into a weird error: CTGDKG023E Error while starting main class.java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException .. Caused by: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: i4clntjni (Not found in java.library.path) Luckily, Google could help me on this one. This technote shows that if there are missing libraries, SDI doesn’t properly install and you will have to uninstall SDI, install the missing libraries, and reinstall SDI.