Re: ssh X11 Forwarding from menu in window manager

[Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir at technion dot ac dot il>]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2002, R Dicaire wrote:

> Hi, I'm trying to get ssh X11 forwarding working via a menu item in
> a window manager (fvwm2) under X11 Cygwin. For the record, it works fine
> under X11 Linux/blackbox.
> In Cygwin, I startx, fvwm2 starts, my menu items for ssh -X are there,
> but when I execute them, they just don't work. I watch the cygwin term I
> started X from for errors, there are none, the Taskbar button for the
> cygwin terminal however indicates "xauth", and the remote app does not
> start up in my X11 session.
> All my ssh keys are correctly configured,

This is probably irrelevant. X11 forwarding is generally not related to
how you authenticated.

> ssh -X works when executed
> from an xterm inside X11 Cygwin, just not from the window manager menu.
>
> I use ssh -X as a replacement for rsh to start remote X11 apps.
>
> Am I missing something?

Try running this command from an xterm and not from a menu item (at least
until you get it working), because this way you can immediately see any
error messages.

First thing you should do is to use the "-v" (verbose) option of ssh to
get more information.
Maybe the remote server does not allow X11 forwarding?

Maybe you need to generate an initial xauthority token in your startx
script. My .xinitrc currently includes:


  export DISPLAY=localhost:0
  xauth generate $DISPLAY
  xhost -

('xhost -' is not mandatory, but can help prevent some neighbours from
sniffing your dipplay)

There are probably better ways of doing this (suggestions anybody?), but
it currently works for me.

BTW: if you always use X11 forwarding (or always use it with some hosts)
consider setting in your config file:

Host = *
  ForwardX11 = yes

or:

Host = somehost
  ForwardX11 = yes

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen                        /"\
mailto:tzafrir@technion.ac.il        \ /  ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Taub 229, 972-4-829-3942,             X   Against  HTML  Mail
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir   / \