Meine derzeitige Podcast-Playlist

Da ich schon ein paar Mal gefragt wurde, liste ich heute mal die Podcasts auf, die ich derzeit regelmäßig höre:

Security Now

Steve Gibson, the man who coined the term spyware and created the first anti-spyware program, creator of Spinrite and ShieldsUP, discusses the hot topics in security today with Leo Laporte.

Der Finanzwesir rockt

Hallo, wir sind Daniel, ein Ex-Berliner, und Albert, ein Rheinländer, der zumindest eine Patentante in Berlin hat.
Wir haben festgestellt, dass zumindest der erste Teil des Hauptstadt-Mottos “Arm aber sexy” für uns nur begrenzten Charme hat.
Deshalb haben wir beschlossen, uns selbst um unser Geld zu kümmern. Dabei sind wir mehr als einmal auf die Nase gefallen, aber jetzt haben wir unsere Finanzen ganz gut im Griff.
Über diesen Weg sprechen wir im Podcast. Was hat sich bewährt, was nicht. Welche Klippen gilt es zu umschiffen.
Unser Versprechen: Wir plaudern nett über das Thema Finanzen. Du wirst eine Menge lernen, aber es wird auch lustig.

Denkangebot Podcast

In diesem Podcast geht Katharina Nocun (kattascha) aktuellen politischen Debatten auf den Grund. Gemeinsam mit Experten nimmt sie Argumente und Fakten auseinander. Dieser Podcast ist ein Denkangebot für alle, die sich gerne tiefer in ein Thema einarbeiten.

Sicherheitshalber

Der Podcast zur sicherheitspolitischen Lage in Deutschland, Europa und der Welt. | Die Welt um Deutschland herum ist im Umbruch. Die Zeiten sind vorbei, in denen die Bundesrepublik sich im Bereich der Sicherheit uneingeschränkt auf andere verlassen konnte. Deutschland ist in der Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik gefordert. Doch die deutsche sicherheitspolitische Debatte lässt weiterhin zu wünschen übrig. „Sicherheitshalber“ schafft Abhilfe. | Hier diskutieren Ulrike Franke (European Council on Foreign Relations), Carlo Masala (Universität der Bundeswehr München), Frank Sauer (Universität der Bundeswehr München), und Thomas Wiegold (augengeradeaus.net) die aktuellen Entwicklungen in der deutschen Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik und die Lage in Europa und der Welt.

Viel Spaß!

Two Gadgets for Apple Users

As I own quite a couple of Apple things, I was looking for a solution to charge all things with little effort and without having too much cables laying around.

I found this wireless charging station from SIMPFUN which let me charge my iPhone, my Apple Watch and my Airpods at the same time with only needing one cable. You can get it in three different colours: White, Grey and Black. An USB-C adapter is also included, so you do not need anything else to charge all devices.

Phone and watch will be charged wireless and for the Airpods there is a Lightning connector at the top where you just put the the Airpod case on.

You can use the nightstand mode of your Apple watch during charging so that you can use it as alarm clock as well.

The only weak point I found so far: The charging station does have a small blue light while charging, which I find too bright in the night. So I put a small sticky tape over it. It is still slightly visible because it does shine through the bottom of the stand but it is no longer disturbing in the night.

For travelling I also found a solution to charge all three devices at the same time with only one cable, the Saiwill 3 in 1 Cable. It gives me two lighting cables for iPhone, Airpods or iPad and also a cable to charge the Apple Watch. On the other side there is one USB-A connector.

So I do only need one cable and a charger like e.g. the Equinux Tizi Tankstelle to charge all my devices while I am travelling.

By the way: If you do also have additional devices which need to be charged via USB-C or Micro-USB, I can recommend the Equinux tizi Schlitzohr which is a combined USB-C, Lightning and Micro-USB cable with an USB-A connector at the other end.

One more thing: If you charge your phones sometimes on public charging stations like e.g. at airports I recommend to use this adapter on your cable.

This adapter will prevent your device to switch to data transfer mode, so you won’t risk data theft or computer viruses if you charge your device at a foreign USB port e.g. at an airport etc.

SSL Certificate Expiration Checking

We just had an issue with an expired SSL certificate. Although the customer had a monitoring system in place, this system failed to inform the administrators of the upcoming certificate expiration which the leads to a system downtime this morning.

In order to be independent of the customer monitoring, I created a short Linux shell script which does the certificate checking by itself and sends out a notification mail if the certificate expiration date is less than x days away.

We are running this script every week via a cron job and let us warn 60 days in advance of the expiration date. So hopefully this will not happen again in future …

Here is the code of the script:

(more…)

HCL Connections 6.0 CR6

The first CR release of Connections since the takeover by HCL has just arrived. It is still a little difficult to find the right links for doumentation and download, but this will hopefully improve in time.

Here are the main links for HCL Connections 6.0 CR6:

HCL Connections 6.0 Documentation

What’s new in HCL Connections 6.0?

Update Strategy for Connections 6.0

HCL Connections 6.0 CR6 Fix List

Download Connections 6.0 CR6 from the HCL FlexNet portal

Download Connections 6.0 CR6 Component Pack 6.0.09 from the HCL FlexNet portal

There are no database updates required for CR6.

WAS FP 15 is still the recommended WAS fixpack version , so you do not need to upgrade WAS if you have FP15 installed with CR5 already.

It is a long time ago since I updated my Connections Wiki. I will now start collecting all links to HCL Connections again here https://urspringer.de/connections.

Papercut – Simple Desktop SMTP Server

The problem

If you ever send emails from an application or web site during development, you’re familiar with the fear of an email being released into the wild. Are you positive none of the ‘test’ emails are addressed to colleagues or worse, customers? Of course, you can setting up and maintain a test email server for development — but that’s a chore. Plus, the delay when you are waiting to view new test emails can radically slow your development cycle.

Papercut to the rescue!

Papercut is a 2-in-1 quick email viewer AND built-in SMTP server (designed to receive messages only). Not only does it not enforce any restrictions how you prepare your email, but it allows you to view the whole email-chilada: body, html, headers, attachment down right down to the naughty raw encoded bits. Papercut can be configured to run on startup and sit quietly (minimized in the tray) only providing a notification when a new message has arrived.

https://github.com/changemakerstudios/papercut

IBM Docs: Error with Conversion Server on Linux

If you install the IBM Docs Conversion Server on a Linux environment as described in this article, it could be that the Symphony tasks will not start. In the error log file (/opt/IBM/ConnectionsDocs/Conversion/symphony/sym_monitor/error.log) you will see an error message that the XWindows system could not be startet:

In this case you need to add the parameter “-headless” to the template file “/opt/IBM/ConnectionsDocs/Conversion/symphony/sym_monitor/template.sh” so that it then looks like that:

After that, reboot the machine and then the Symphony soffice tasks should be running.

[Thanks to Nico]

Enabling IPv6 with Netgear Switch GS116E

Just a note to myself as I spent many hours in finding out why my clients did not get an IPv6 address from my pfSense router/firewall:

If you are using a Netgear switch (I am using here a Netgear GS116E), you need to make sure that the option

“Block Unknown Multicast Address” is set to DISABLED.

If you have that option enabled the IPv6 router advertisement (RA) packets seem to be filtered out. For me this was not very obvious …