Hcl Connections

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 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/).

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.

The newsletter in version 2 format has one big disadvantage, we or our users lost the easy links to the topic, author profile or application.

Connections 7 has a new Administration Console to access Communities Template administration and Mobile Administration.

The Administration Console can be reached on https://cnx-hostname/cnxadmin/. The / at the end is important, because the ingress rule just forwards /cnxadmin/(.*).

On Firefox you get this view:

With Chrome (Chromium, Edge) the left menu is missing. There is a display: inline-flex for some elements in index.css of the Administration Console.

So how can we inject a repaired css file into the container?