[CentOS] C6: ssh X-forwarding does not work

John Hodrien J.H.Hodrien at leeds.ac.uk
Sat Oct 29 23:26:04 UTC 2011


On Sat, 29 Oct 2011, Cliff Pratt wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 8:58 PM, John Hodrien <J.H.Hodrien at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:
>> On Sat, 29 Oct 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>
>>> Do some of the checkbox installs omit it?   I just ran into this on a
>>> system where I chose the 'web server' install, then wanted to run
>>> gparted remotely.
>>
>> Yes, it's definitely possible to install without it.  I've done the same as
>> you when setting up servers and had to add xauth afterwards to get remote X
>> working.  It's a real gotcha for people who don't know about it, as other than
>> DISPLAY not being set, nothing leaps out at you to say it's because xauth
>> isn't installed.  It'd be quite nice if default ssh emitted a warning message
>> about this at a non-debug level.
>>
> It's not an ssh issue so why would ssh emit the message?

I think my view woudld be "because it can".  You're asking for ssh to forward
X traffic, only ssh can't for a reason that's not ssh's fault, but nonetheless
it knows why.  It can share that information with the user or not and that's
its choice.

ssh tells you when it creates a .Xauthority file for the first time.  Why does
it do that?  It's all about passing on useful information to the user when you
think it's useful, and keeping it to yourself when you think it's not.  I'm
not making a big deal of this, but I think I'd draw the line in a slightly
different place.

jh


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