Hi all, thanks for the many thoughtful replies, especially Trevor Benson for the detailed list of suggestions. I've everything suggested but still get authentication that times out before a gnome session comes up. I tried scraping things out on the server side, reinstalling, rebooting, make a completely new test user account, restarting the X on the client side. I try to connect to the new account, and still get authenticated but no gnome for centos 5. from the same nxclient I can connect to a centos 4.4 box, and vnc connects fine to centos 5 and gives me a gnome desktop. looks to me like it might be a quirk of the new mac client interacting with the centos 5 nxserver (but not 4.4), based on other folks connecting just fine to centos 5. there was a note about "known issues" on the wiki, so I also installed the NX client for linux and installing on the server: rpm -i nxclient-2.1.0-17.i386.rpm this gives me new stuff in /usr/NX which I also copied to the freenx style directory for good measure and restarted things cp /usr/NX/bin/nxclient /etc/nxserver/ nxserver --restart I tried connecting from client, authenticates but no gnome. the nxclient I am using (mac OS X) I downloaded within the last week, the nomachine site says its release 2.1.0-17. and using this same installation of nxclient on my mac I get a gnome session when connecting to a centos 4.4box in case its useful to have more of a play-by-play in the archives, here what I tried: #on centos 5 server machine, I removed, reinstalled, rebooted: su yum remove nx freenx # the remove succeeds, I do the following for good measure rm -Rf /etc/nxserver rm -Rf ~<me>/.nx reboot # server comes up su yum update yum install nx freenx # output looks good, includes: # Stopping sshd: [ OK ] # Starting sshd: [ OK ] # Installed: freenx.i386 0:0.5.0-13.el5.centos nx.i386 0:2.1.0-6.el5.centos # Complete! nxserver --adduser me nxserver --passwd me # manually copy /etc/nxserver/client.id_dsa.key --> client nxviewer reboot # server comes up nmap -p 1-65535 localhost # the only open port is # 22/tcp open ssh # and I have ssh forwarding enabled, even though it should not make a difference nxserver --status # NX> 100 NXSERVER - Version 1.5.0-60-SVN OS (GPL) # NX> 110 NX Server is running # NX> 999 Bye # so at this point I try to connect from the client, I get authenticated and then nothing more, times out after a minute # now I add a new user account to the system, testuser, a completely new account, and add this account to the nx users nxserver --useradd testuser # from the client, I try connecting to account testuser, get authenticated, no gnome desktop (or anything else), # and the connection times out. the error in the client "details" window is NX> 203 NXSSH running with pid: 1732 NX> 285 Enabling check on switch command NX> 285 Enabling skip of SSH config files NX> 285 Setting the preferred NX options NX> 200 Connected to address: ***edited*** on port: 22 NX> 202 Authenticating user: nx NX> 208 Using auth method: publickey HELLO NXSERVER - Version 1.5.0-60-SVN OS (GPL) NX> 105 hello NXCLIENT - Version 1.5.0 NX> 134 Accepted protocol: 1.5.0 NX> 105 SET SHELL_MODE SHELL NX> 105 SET AUTH_MODE PASSWORD NX> 105 login NX> 101 User: testuser NX> 102 Password: NX> 103 Welcome to: ***edited*** user: testuser NX> 105 listsession --user="testuser" --status="suspended,running" --geometry="1280x854x32+render" --type="unix-gnome" NX> 127 Sessions list of user 'testuser' for reconnect: Display Type Session ID Options Depth Screen Status Session Name ------- ---------------- -------------------------------- -------- ----- -------------- ----------- ------------------------------ NX> 148 Server capacity: not reached for user: testuser NX> 105 startsession --link="isdn" --backingstore="1" --nodelay="1" --encryption="1" --cache="8M" --images="32M" --media="0" --session="***edited***" --type="unix-gnome" --geometry="1024x768+128+30" --kbtype="query" --screeninfo="1024x768x32+render" ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host Killed by signal 15. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20070426/72de8c42/attachment-0004.html>