RE: Using xauth with Cygwin-X

["Baksik, Frederick (NM75)" <frederick dot baksik at honeywell dot com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-xfree-owner 
> [mailto:cygwin-xfree-owner] On Behalf Of Larry Griffith
> Sent: Monday, August 01, 2005 12:28 PM
> Subject: Using xauth with Cygwin-X
> 
> I use openSSH running under Cygwin-X to communicate with a 
> Solaris workstation at work.  When I logged into Solaris with 
> SSH, I received messages that there was no valid xauth data 
> and that "fake" data would be used for X11 forwarding.  My 
> mail reader (exmh) also complained repeatedly about failures 
> of xauth authentication.
> 
> I dug out my old X manual (which goes back to X11R5) and 
> looked up xauth.  It suggested running this command under Solaris:
> 
> xauth -extract $DISPLAY | rsh <my home PC with Cygwin> xauth merge -
> 
> Since I didn't want to use rsh I did this:
> 
> 1) (Solaris) xauth -extract $DISPLAY > xauth.data
> 
> 2) I transferred xauth.data to the root directory under 
> Cygwin, using SSH.
> 
> 3) (Cygwin) xauth -merge /xauth.data
> 
> The last command told me that a new /home/larry/.Xauthority 
> file was created, which made sense to me.  Otherwise there 
> were no messages.
> 
> I shut down my bash shell, closed my Cygwin X server, and 
> restarted everything.  I still get the same errors when I log 
> into the Solaris workstation.  Any suggestions?
> 
>                                                               
>       Larry Griffith

Here is a link to the Cygwin/X user's guide on Displaying Remote Clients.
http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ug/using-remote-apps.html 

In the past I was messing X11 forwarding with a Sun box and xauth was kind
of a pain to use with telnet.

In cygwin type
xauth generate your_host:0 . trusted timeout 300
xauth nextract - your_host:0

On the remote station:
xauth nmerge -

Select the output from the cygwin command and copy it to the input of the
remote station.  Now the remote station can connect to the cygwin Xserver
for the next 5 minutes.  Also resetting the Cygwin Xserver will invalidate
any keys generated.

The biggest pain is that it doesn't always seem to work.  It seems sometimes
that cygwin will always reject the key.  Also, some programs will halt with
this kind of failure when starting (e.g. dtterm):
X Error of failed request:  BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  18 (X_ChangeProperty)
  Atom id in failed request:  0xda
  Serial number of failed request:  1720
  Current serial number in output stream:  1722
Others will crash while running, also with a "BadAtom" failure.

I didn't see these problems when using the xhost + method in the user's
guide.

YMMV

--
Frodak








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