X display sharing fails (xauth)

[Joe Smith]

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Joe Smith wrote:
>> ... Any ideas what broke, or suggestions for getting my old
>> configuration working again?
>> 
> Several thoughts... first, since you don't tell us what you meant by
> "an xauth entry that allowed the other user access to my display," no
> one will see anything there.

Fair enough, but I have no idea what to call it. Xauth is an 
impenetrable mystery to me.

All I did was crib from the man page:

$ xauth extract - $DISPLAY | ssh testuser xauth merge -

> Second, did you do anything with networking and/or DNS which could
> have confused the issue? That includes installing "upgrades," which
> has been known to close security holes by making the whole method
> stop working.

Nothing obvious. Gdm was updated on 3 Oct, but I'm fairly sure I've 
shared the display successfully after that. I guess that's the best 
possibility.

There was an update of 'dbus-x11' that fits my time frame estimate 
better, but the package description seems to throw water on that:

| D-BUS contains some tools that require Xlib to be installed, those are
| in this separate package so server systems need not install X.

> And finally, why not just ssh to the other user with X forwarding? 
> ssh -X user2 at localhost would let user2 run X apps without xhost
> configuration.
> 
> Maybe some of that will help.

Yes, very helpful--thanks.

Good point; I forgot about ssh. It's certainly a good solution but seems 
pretty heavyweight for what I need, both in setup work and while running.

Any suggestion on how to follow-up on the gdm angle? I guess I could 
just file a bug on xauth and see what happens.

Thanks again,

<Joe