Docker Done Easy – XM with Headless SXA

Options. There’s always options. Some options, like paying to change your flight, suck. Some, like getting a free upgrade to first class…don’t suck. What does this have to do with Docker? Nothing, aside from the fact they are options. Anyway, I suck at intros to my blog posts, but it’s out of the way. Let’s…


Windows Hosts Writer v 2.0

It’s been quite a while since WHW has received an update. Michael West (yes, that Michael West) has been gracious enough to get things up to speed with the latest version of dotnet core, docker, and even made a few enhancements. I’m not going to regurgitate it here, as you can read about all the…


AKS Quality of Life: Warming your Containers in k8s

UPDATE: I totally forgot to put the source code link in here! https://github.com/RAhnemann/Container-Warmer If you’ve been around the docker block a little bit with Sitecore, you know by now that when a container is launched, it’s not really ready to do anything. It’s barely alive. In fact, Docker and k8s know this, and have a…


Troubleshooting SSO and Azure AD Groups

We’re currently in the middle of an upgrade project and one of the new requirements was to add in Azure AD for Single Sign On. This is relatively easy, given you just have to update a single config file in Identity Server (And configure AD, but that’s not my job!). You can read all about…


Migrating from Docker Desktop

If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that there’s some changes coming to Docker Desktop. Notably, it’s not going to be free to use for companies that make over $10M or have over 250 employees. This isn’t a nail in the coffin for docker on your desktop, however. Most docker users on windows usually are…


Securing your Connection Strings with Key Vault

I’ll start off that this entry isn’t inherently specific to Sitecore. It’s more of an Azure exercise in Principle of Least Privilege (PLP). So, let’s talk about a couple baselines here: What’s Azure Key Vault? Azure Key Vault is a service/product offered within Azure. It allows for the storage of Key, Secrets and Certificates. Each…


Recovering your CM From a Solr Hiccup

We’ve all been there before. Sometimes Solr does something funky and you end up with this on your Index Rebuild screen: What happened? Probably some sort of hiccup with solr. Once Sitecore loses connectivity though, it usually takes a restart in order for things to come back together. I did a little digging into how…


Docker and Firefox – Fix OOTB HTTP Redirect

I’m a Firefox guy. It’s ok. I’m good with it. I like Firefox. It has some quirks. Some of those quirks are actually some security practices. One of them…I’ll share today. Ok, so I’ve been doing some docker-ing. Wanting to create some specific pre-built images/accelerator type things on my own, I started off with a…


Experience Profile: XdbSearchUnavailableException

Our team was standing up a new instance of Sitecore XP1 10.1 and noticed that anytime you loaded Experience Profile, you got a nice error about “An error has occurred”. Digging into the XHR posts, there’s a big fat 500 response from the Contact Search API: Exception calling GetService() – Service Type: “ContactsController” System.InvalidOperationException: Unable…


Windows Hosts Writer – v 1.4

Edit: This has been updated to reflect that v2.0 has been released! View here. There’s a fun bug in windows having to deal with the number of hostnames per line in your hosts file. Any hostnames after the first nine just won’t resolve. That’s fun. Right? I’ve made some updates to the WHW image that…