Tag Archives: X11

X11 Forwarding Broken on Solaris

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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.

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Strange X11 Forwarding Problem

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I started getting this error:
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication
when trying to forward X11 applications from a Linux server to my Mac. I had been forwarding the display on this server for years, so I was a little unsure what could be causing it. In the end, it turned out that I had filled up /var, and X11 could not write to “/var/log/XFree86.0.log”. It was an easy fix, but the error was certainly no help.

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Blank Window When SSH Forwarding X11 Sessions

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There are a number of applications running on our servers that have GUI’s that I need to display on the Mac in my office. While the traditional method of exporting the server-side display to my desktop works, it is inherently insecure because the entire session, including any passwords that may be sent are all transmitted in clear-text.

Better to use SSH X11 forwarding. This way the entire session is encrypted and nobody can snoop your passwords. The process of using SSH X11 Forwarding goes something like this:

On the server-side (the machine from which you want to forward the display, make sure this line is in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file:

X11Forwarding yes

If you had to add it, restart the sshd service.

/sbin/service sshd restart

Now, from the client-side (the machine on which you want to display the forwarded X11 application) connect to the server-side machine with the -X flag. Like so:

ssh -X username@remoteserver

Now you should be able to start X applications and have them display on your client machine through an ssh tunnel. If you are like me, however, some Java applications will not display correctly. Instead of popping up a window with the full application in it, I would only see a totally useless blank window. This frustrated me for months until I found this article at kraftek.com that details how to resolve the problem.

It turns out that all you have to do is put this line in the ssh_config file on your client-side:

ForwardX11Trusted yes

After logging out and back into the server-side machine, everything worked perfectly.

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