Strange interaction of VNC and ssh on recent Nevada build
Friday Nov 02, 2007
I recently started using Solaris Nevada (first build 75 and now build 76) rather than Solaris 10 Update 4 on my Ultra-45 at work. I usually have a VNC session to which I connect from home and occasionally from work. But since I converted to using Nevada I've occasionally had xscreensaver tell me that it can't open the display. This makes it impossible to unlock the display and I have to go either kill the VNC server or just kill xscreensaver.
This morning when this happened it finally dawned on me to check my Xauthority file. For some reason I checked the XAUTHORITY environment variable and much to my surprise it pointed to a file in /tmp that didn't exist. Example:
$ echo $XAUTHORITY
/tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
$ ls -l /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile
ls: /tmp/ssh-xauth-_Raqkq/xauthfile: No such file or directory
Huh, go figure. I realized at this point that I had connected to my work system from my home system using ssh with X forwarding. It appears that at some point the Nevada sshd was changed to use a temporary file for XAUTHORITY, and this change hasn't made it back to S10.
Now I start my VNC sessions by ssh without X forwarding or directly from my desktop X session, where XAUTHORITY is not set. I should probably do something with the env command to set up a known environment, but for now this works.
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