topic Re: Disable all the connectors in Connectivity & Data Prep

Disable all the connectors

Sivanesan — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:08:08 GMT

Hi Everyone

We pre-populate the data for the our users and hence we want to disable all the external data source connectors except file upload. I followed this link and renamed all the connector folders which eventually hide the connectors except ODBC and OLE DB connectors. But when I was trying to remove a patch(during Qliksense upgrade) it failed mentioning that it couldn't find the connector paths. What is the officially supported option to disable the all the connectors including the OLE DB and ODBC connectors?

Re: Disable all the connectors

Andrea_Bertazzo — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:40:05 GMT

hi @Sivanesan

You can revert to the original names for the connector folders. This should enable the upgrade.

There is no officially supported method to completely disable all data source connectors except file upload in Qlik Sense. However, you can take the following steps to limit connectivity options:

During Qlik Sense installation, you can exclude the ODBC Connector Package by using the SKIPODBCCONNECTOR=1 flag in silent installation mode. This removes many of the database connectors. See this article.
If you decide to proceed this way and to uninstall Qlik Sense, ensure you have created a backup first.
For remaining ODBC connections, you can restrict access to ODBC data sources by not configuring any DSNs in the Windows ODBC Data Source Administrator.
OLE DB connections cannot be fully disabled, as far as I know, but you can try restricting file system access, as mentioned in this article.

I hope this helps

Re: Disable all the connectors

Sivanesan — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 04:28:22 GMT

Thanks for the response. Our main intention is to block access to any external domains as it was flagged in VA scan that using a OLE DB connection Qliksense server was induced to perform DNS lookup to an arbitrary domain.