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From: schoch@sheba.arc.nasa.gov (Steve Schoch)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Authorization questions
Message-ID: <1990Dec10.185342.4364@news.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 10 Dec 90 18:53:42 GMT
References: <8458@star.cs.vu.nl>
Sender: usenet@news.arc.nasa.gov (USENET Administration)
Reply-To: schoch@trident.arc.nasa.gov (Steve Schoch)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
Lines: 54

In article <8458@star.cs.vu.nl>, vdlinden@cs.vu.nl (Frank van der Linden) writes:
|> The second one is the one I'm having trouble with. I tried creating a
|> .Xauthority file with 'xauth'. The file was indeed created, but it didn't seem
|> to work. After 'xauth add my_host:0 . 1234', a 'rsh other_host xterm -display 
|> my_host:0' still gave a message saying that the server denied permission.

There are two problems here:  The authorization information (the "MAGIC COOKIE"
which in your case is 0x1234) is kept by the server.  The server does not
generate this cookie but reads it from a file ON STARTUP.  If you look
closely at the xauth program you will notice that it does not connect to
the server but only changes your ".Xauthority" file.

|> After this, I tried to start the server with '-auth $HOME/.Xauthority'. It
|> had some effect, but too much ... My own clients were also refused connection
|> (to 'unix:0.0'). I tried adding this name to the .Xauthority file, but still
|> no luck. The result in both cases was an endless loop in my login sequence,
|> only stoppable by logging in on the workstation from a terminal and killing
|> the server, which in the end left 2 workstations in a weird keyboard-status...

Aside:  When you kill the server you should give it a SIGTERM (kill <pid>),
never a SIGKILL (kill -9 <pid>).  When the server gets a SIGTERM it should
clean up after itself.

I'm a little unclear here about the format of the auth file.  On my system,
I use xdm which generates both the file used with the "-auth" argument and
the ".Xauthority" file in your home directory.  The .Xauthority file has
the following information:

DISPLAY		TYPE		KEY
DISPLAY2	TYPE		KEY
etc.

I'm not sure in what format is the information in the file used by the "-auth"
argument.

Since your server has two types of connections you want two entries in your
.Xauthority file:

my_host:0	MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1	1234
my_host/unix:0	MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1	1234

Then you want to start the server with "-auth $HOME/.Xauthority".  Clients
connection to unix:0 should now work.

To bring up an X window from another host, you should do the following (assuming
that DISPLAY is set to my_host:0):

xauth extract - $DISPLAY | rsh other_host xauth merge -
rsh other_host xterm -display $DISPLAY

This will copy the information from your .Xauthority file to the other system.
Xterm will look at the file and send the key over.

	Steve