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.

Some of my profiles

           

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.

Christoph Stoettner
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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.

Created: Read in about 2 min
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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.

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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

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Read in about 3 min
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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.

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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.

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I create a lot of virtual machines during the week to test deployments, or try to digg into problems of deployments. In the past I used Vmware Workstation, Oracle VirtualBox or MS HyperV on my desktops, but I also used Vmware ESX. I tried to use Vagrant and Packer to prepare images and distribute them, but wasn’t satisfied at all.

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Read in about 6 min