export DISPLAY from LnxBox1 to LnxBox2 not working

On 1 Feb 2006 07:43:48 -0800, Joseph staggered into the Black Sun and said:

O RLY? YA RLY. NO WAI!!1!

As of about 2 years ago, X servers on major distros are started with -nolisten tcp. This plugs up any security holes with X's network stuff, and most people like this because they don't use the networked display features of X.

+host no longer works. To change that, you'll have to find out where X is started from--probably gdm or kdm. kdm's config file is in $KDEDIR-share-config-kdm-kdmrc , find the ServerArgsLocal line and remove "-nolisten tcp" from it. Then restart X. Also, you shouldn't do xhost +, even if you're behind a firewall and in a trusted environment. The temptation to "export DISPLAY=bobs.machine:0 ; xeyes & ; xeyes & ; xeyes & ..." is just too great.

See above 2 paragraphs. ssh launched with -X or -Y from machine1 (usually) has access to machine1's :0 , so ssh can draw stuff on machine1. When ssh hits machine2, it sets DISPLAY to localhost:10 , and X protocol traffic coming back from localhost:10 is encrypted and sent to machine1, where ssh decrypts the protocol frames and fires them to machine1's X socket. There are more details here that I'm not covering, but that's basically how X forwarding works with ssh. HTH,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL