X forwarding an ssh connection with sudo

Brian J.Conway bconway at alum.wpi.edu
Thu Oct 10 15:07:21 EDT 2002


> I'm trying to sudo a command that runs an X app through an ssh 
> connection between a linux machine and a solaris box.  The problem I'm 
> having is that the X forwarding doesn't allow a window to be thrown back 
> when you're changing uid's.  I believe that when I use sudo (or su) it 
> loses control of the pipe that would normally have the app sent back 
> through.  

I ran into this same problem when logging in as a normal user and trying 
to run an X app after running 'su -'.  I found that the default behavior 
for this had changed in the recent versions of OpenSSH and could be 
reverted by editing the line in the sshd_config file to "X11UseLocalhost 
no".  There are security implications to this and you should read up on 
them to make sure it's what you want to do, as I don't remember exactly 
what they are.

-b





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