If you’re running Solaris 8 or 9 and an upgrade results in broken SSH X11 forwarding, the problem may be Sun’s socfs bug. The symptom will be SSH’s failure to set the $DISPLAY variable and an error in your system log looking something like this:
Jun 3 09:40:24 servername sshd[26432]: [ID 800057 auth.error] error: Failed to allocate internet-domain X11 display socket.
To fix this, you can either install Sun’s latest socfs patch for your version of the OS, or simply force sshd into IPv4 mode by doing the following:
Edit you sshd_config file, adding the following:
# IPv4 only
ListenAddress 0.0.0.0
Edit your sshd startup script to issue a “-4″ to sshd on start:
case "$1" in
'start')
echo 'starting ssh daemon'
/usr/local/sbin/sshd -4
;;
Restart sshd, and that should pretty much do it… Enjoy.
This appears to also affect Solaris 10. To work around the issue in 10 simply edit /lib/svc/method/sshd and append the ‘-4′ to the start function. once the file is saved simply issue ’svcadm restart ssh’
THANK YOU!!!! I dont have a cd/dvd drive on my sun netra x1 so a reinstall is pretty much a no go. You saved my system!
Current patch created the problem for systems what only use IPv4. The solution, until a binary resolution is provided, is to config up an IPv6 localhost interface as such:
ifconfig lo0 inet6 plumb up
Which brings up:
lo0: flags=2002000849 mtu 8252 index 1
inet6 ::1/128
Ensure the /etc/hosts as the following entry as well:
::1 localhost
This will bring up a ipv6 localhost interface, which allows the forwarding over X11 to operate without a problem. Recycle the ssh daemon and it should work without a problem.
I don’t know better way to express my gratitude for your help: Thank you.