Welcome @stoeps.de, the blog of Christoph Stoettner
I work at Vegard IT GmbH as a senior consultant with a focus on collaboration software, Kubernetes, security and automation. I mainly deal with HCL Connections, WebSphere Application Server, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform and Linux.
Sometimes my daily work results in technical talks and blog articles, which you can follow here more or less regularly. You can find the presentations in the main menu under public speaking .
I created a list of tools I use regularly, most of which have been released under an open source license.
In my spare time I read a lot, test all kinds of technical software and gadgets and try to follow about 200 RSS feeds.
Here you can find a collection of them.
This is my private blog, all opinions are my own.
Last created or modified articles
I started reviewing old blog post and replace links, or check if the information is still valid. So here are the last updated articles.
- Indefinitely growing homepage.sr_index_docs table and forgotten search nodes · Updated: 2025-01-24 · Created: 2025-01-23
- Highlights as start page hides the Community overview · Updated: 2024-12-04 · Created: 2021-11-18
- HorizontalPodAutoscalers (HPA) with HCL Connections Component Pack · Updated: 2024-12-04 · Created: 2023-05-30
- Disable PDF Export in HCL Connections 8 · Created: 2024-12-02
- Automate screenshots of web pages with Eyewhitness · Created: 2024-11-03


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/
).
Last Update: Read in about 5 min

I installed HCL Connections Docs 2.0.1 on top of an already installed HCL Connections 6.5CR1 with Docs Viewer. Usually a simple task, the installation was smooth, after the mandatory restart the Edit
button in the files’ application appeared and all looked good, but when the users clicked on edit
a white page was loaded.

Update 2021-12-13 2021-12-15
- Elasticsearch: Apache Log4j2 Remote Code Execution (RCE) Vulnerability - CVE-2021-44228 - ESA-2021-31
- HCL: CVE-2021-44228 : Security Advisory
- IBM: Security Bulletin: Vulnerability in Apache Log4j affects WebSphere Application Server (CVE-2021-44228)
- Security Bulletin: HCL Connections Security Update for Apache Log4j 2 Vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228)
- CVE-2021-45046: It was found that the fix to address CVE-2021-44228 in Apache Log4j 2.15.0 was incomplete in certain non-default configurations.
So there is a fix for kc.war
which updates the log4j
2.8 to 2.15, Elasticsearch in Component Pack has log4j 2.8 and 2.11 included but is not vulnerable because of additional security settings.
Last Update: Read in about 5 min

During troubleshooting of WebSphere Application Server it is necessary to enable traces and see more detailed log messages.
Enabling these traces is very annoying, because you need to follow long click paths within the Integrated Solution Console (ISC).

During the latest automated deployment of the HCL Connections Desktop Plug-ins for Microsoft™ Windows™ , I had issues activating the Password Save Policy
. We wanted to disable the option that users can save passwords.
The documentation tells us, that the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\IBM\Social Connectors\Settings\Password Save Policy
needs to be set to 1
to achieve this.

Some time ago I got the tip from HCL Support, that the Create Community
button will recognize the role community-creator
only when the gatekeeper option CATALOG_CARD_UPDATED
is set to false
.
This is working, but I had to complain, that this option activates some code, which loads fonts from a CDN instead of the local Connections deployment.
Last Update: Read in about 2 min

Connections 7 creates the Community Highlights page automatically and sets it as the start page for new communities.
That’s configured in the highway service, which is available for administrative users on https://your_connections_url/connections/config/highway.main.gatekeeper.tiles
Last Update: Read in about 3 min

A long time ago, I wrote about the new implementation of allowlists in HCL Connections and that the documentation on customization and adding new rules was an absolute miracle for me.
Last Update: Read in about 5 min

In the post Create A Test Environment with Terraform and KVM I created the first three virtual machines, now we configure a DNS server so name resolution works as expected.
Since HCL Connections started to add Kubernetes to the stack, we need to use proper name resolution instead of just editing /etc/hosts
. That’s a bit of an effort, but in the end it is way easier than checking several hosts if the hosts file is uptodate.
Last Update: Read in about 7 min