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.

The last days I attended Engage 2022 in the Bruges Meeting & Convention Centre (BMCC) . The first in person event for HCL Software for two years. Engage 2020 was the last event before the big lockdowns. Meeting so many friends again after so long time felt really awesome, and I enjoyed these days very much. We had good conversations and some Belgium beer to celebrate the reunion.

This was my 6th or 7th Engage and as always the organizers around Theo and his wife Hilde did a great job, arriving at the venue felt like coming home.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

HCL Support published a collection of links to MustGather informations for Connections and addons. That’s the perfect starting point to start troubleshooting and collecting logs for your support cases.

• Collecting Data: Repository of MustGather for Connections

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/).