Connections
Disable PDF Export in HCL Connections 8 
By Christoph Stoettner | 12/3/24 7:47 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
PDF Export sometimes uses a lot of resources and disabling helps to stabilize the environment
I had some issues with PDF export functionality in HCL Connections the last weeks.
The server became unresponsive multiple times due to high load from PDF exports. To quickly address the issue, the simplest solution is to disable the PDF export feature by configuring the icxt.pdfexport.access.requiredrole property in the Resource Environment Entries.
Changing the file size limit for a community
By Martijn de Jong | 11/30/24 3:27 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
By default, a HCL Connections community can contain 500 MB of files in the Files widget. Depending on what kind of content is posted in the community, that might not be enough. It’s possible to change the file limit, both for communities and for personal files.
Apple push notification certificates expire on 4th of July 2024
By Christoph Stoettner | 6/24/24 8:23 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Push notifications certificates in HCL Connections 8 CR5 and CR6 need an update before 4th of July
Last week I checked some HCL Connections 8 CRx downloads in Flexnet and recognized these packages available since 2024-06-13: APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) certificates renewal for 2025.
Sounds normal, these updates need to be installed each year. First, I checked for the knowledge base document mentioned in the file name . It’s not published until now.
So I downloaded the package and extracted the content. The included certificates are valid from 2024-04-25 to 2025-05-25, so they start and end in the middle of the year.
Installing Huddo Boards on WebSphere-only Connections
By Martijn de Jong | 6/24/24 8:21 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Let me clarify what this article is about. Huddo (also known as ISW) is selling 2 versions of their Boards product:
Kudos Boards – The Java application that can be installed on WebSphere. Active development has stopped a few years ago
Huddo Boards – The product consisting of several containers, which can be installed on Kubernetes or a container engine like Docker. A version with limited functionality is part of the HCL Connections component pack and known as Activities Plus. This product is actively being developed and also available for other platforms.
Although the Connections Component pack was introduced in version 6 already, many companies refrained from installing it due to the serious amount of extra infrastructure needed to run these components, which includes a Kubernetes cluster. We call these the WebSphere-only Connections installations, as they only include the WebSphere stack part of Connections.
So what if you would like to use the full power of Huddo Boards without having to install a Kubernetes cluster? That’s what this article is about.
Be careful with search-admin role in HCL Connections
By Christoph Stoettner | 5/3/24 5:37 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
I showed, in several slides and sessions, how you can use the search-admin role in the search application of HCL Connections for troubleshooting and reviewing some key configurations.
In several environments, my user or other administrative users have this role, just to access the link to /search/serverStatus for example.
Be aware, when you assign the search-admin role in the search application to a user, the advanced search will not return any result.
Installing wireguard on CentOS Stream 9
By Martijn de Jong | 1/15/24 3:37 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
As I do a lot of my research on new Domino versions, Connections versions and HCL DX on my own server at home and as I’m often not at home, I figured I needed a VPN tunnel to my server, so I can work as if I am home. Wireguard has become kind of the de facto standard for these kind of situations, so I looked into installing it on my CentOS Stream 9 host.
Troubleshooting Top Updates in HCL Connections
By Christoph Stoettner | 12/5/23 2:25 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Orient Me shows Top Updates on the startpage of Connections, but sometimes this view is empty, how is this generated?
Last week, I had three systems with issues displaying the Top Updates in the Orient Me. So I tried to find out which applications and containers are involved in generating the content for this view.
First, we need to know that Top Updates are part of the Component Pack, and the content of Latest Updates is the Activity stream data, which is read from the homepage database.
If the Top Updates tab is not visible after deploying the Component Pack, check LotusConnections-config.xml; the serviceReference for orientme needs to be enabled. There is only one serviceReference allowed for an application in this file, so check for duplicate definitions when the tab is still missing.
Hide widget from Highlights
By Christoph Stoettner | 11/30/23 2:53 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
With HCL Connections 6.5 and later, we got the add-on HCL Connections Engagement Center (aka CEC, HCEC, ICEC or XCC) included in a normal HCL Connections deployment.
The HCL Connections license contains the supplement that HCEC can be used within Communities and is the base for the Highlights application. All other options are hidden and could be enabled in LotusConnections-config.xml (set <genericProperty name="icec.light">false</genericProperty>), but then you need to order the HCL Connections Engagement Center license.
Couple of things to watch out for when applying CR’s to HCL Connections
By Wannes Rams | 11/7/23 10:14 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams
I was updating a couple of Connections environments to CR4 and some of them are using SSO using OIDC and a custom database name for ICEC ( so not ESSAPPS)
Security Directory Integrator connecting to Active Directory LDAPS
By Unknown Author | 11/3/23 2:28 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
I had one Connections’ environment that I wanted to switch from OpenLDAP to Active Directory LDAP. The old OpenLDAP environment used LDAPS to connect, and so I assumed that the change was done quickly.
Migrate MongoDB in HCL Connections Component Pack 8
By Christoph Stoettner | 9/22/23 3:31 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
The official documentation, “Migrating data from MongoDB 3 to 5”,
wants to dump the MongoDB databases in 3.6 and then restore this data into the newly deployed MongoDB 5.
One issue with this process is that we can’t run the two MongoDB versions in parallel on Kubernetes because the provided helm charts and container for MongoDB 3.6 stop running after Kubernetes 1.21. On the other side, the helm chart providing MongoDB 5 can’t be installed on those old Kubernetes versions. So the process to update is:
Migration process
Dump databases in MongoDB 3.6 (version delivered with Connections 7)
Update Kubernetes to 1.25 or 1.27
Restore MongoDB databases to version 5.0
So, you have to plan the process in advance because it is difficult to get the data when you forget something.
width=device-width,initial-scale=1,user-scalable=no Migrate MongoDB in HCL Connections Component Pack 8 · stoeps 49.642538;8.638950 DE Heppenheim, Germany 49.642538, 8.638950 Heppenheim The official documentation, “Migrating data from MongoDB 3 to 5”, wants to dump the MongoDB databases in 3.6 and then restore this data in
HCL Connections Mail Plug-in Deployment – Missing Information in the Documentation
By Milan Matejic | 5/23/23 12:18 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
If you are planning to deploy the HCL Connections Mail Plug-in, take note of the KB0092821 knowledge base article. This is a mandatory step that must be done in HCL Connections 8 CR1 and newer environments. If the steps described in KB0092821 article are not followed, you will get the following error message in the browser console: Error: Unable to load https://<mailserver_hostname> status: 403
Build mongodb5 image for Component Pack with Buildah
By Christoph Stoettner | 5/17/23 7:14 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams
Build Mongodb5 Image For Component Pack With Buildah
Issues configuring the Sharepoint widget for Communities
By Wannes Rams | 4/6/23 11:49 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams
On a recent deployment of HCL Connections I struggled getting the SharePoint widget to work.
Quick Tip: Stashing Log Files From Domino Testcontainers
By Jesse Gallagher | 3/29/23 3:55 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
I've been doing a little future-proofing in the XPages Jakarta EE project lately and bumped against a common pitfall in my test setup: since I create a fresh Domino Testcontainer with each run, diagnostic information like the XPages log files are destroyed at the end of each test-suite execution.
HCL Connections 8 – PDF Export Issues After Installing CNX in a Clustered WAS Environment
By Milan Matejic | 3/24/23 5:12 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro
Recently I encountered an issue with PDF Export, right after the installation of HCL Connections applications in a multi-node, clustered, IBM WebSphere Application Server environment. This problem only occurs in a multi-node WAS environment.
In the HCL Connections GUI, in the “PDF Export Access” settings of the”Edit Community” menu (Community –> Community Actions –> Edit Community –> PDF Export Access), the following error was displayed:
Error 500: org.springframework.web.util.NestedServletException: Handler dispatch failed; nested exception is java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/ibm/ess/ic/ic360/security/tai/Ic360ImpersonateUserTAI
HCL Connections – Journey to Connections 8
By Urs Meli | 2/27/23 10:10 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams
After the Connections 8 CR1 had been released, we upgraded our production environment. This is our journey
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.