So despite tons of research, reading countless threads, and trying a variety of different ideas to get this working, I seem to have a debian lenny server that just will NOT forward X through ssh for some unknown reason. there are really 2 different ways I'm trying to get this done (or 2 workstations to which I need the server to forward X). the primary (and most important) is to my windows XP user who is using this box as a development server. her login is unprivileged, though I dont think that should really matter. she is using putty to ssh into the box (and I've verified that the X forwarding option in putty is enabled), and I have xming installed on her machine to accommodate the forwarding. when I just couldnt get X to forward to her machine at all, I tried using my own ubuntu 9.04 desktop workstation to troubleshoot the issue, and I cant even run xclock (or any other X app for that matter) from my own linux box here, which leads me to believe that the issue is on the server side of things.

so now on to what I've already tried. As ive already stated, I have verified that the X forwarding option is enabled in putty and xming is installed and running on the user's XP box. naturally, I'm using the -X option on my own machine when I ssh into the server. in the sshd_config on the server, I have verified that it has the following lines exist:

X11Forwarding yes
AllowTcpForwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10

At first, I was only getting the error: Error: Can't open display: so I figured the env variable hadn't been set right. my attempt to fix this one was to do: export DISPLAY=localhost:10.0 At first the way it just hung there for a bit, I thought that was going to work, but that basically made it only take longer to produce the error: Error: Can't open display: localhost:10.0 so basically Im right back where I started. I've double checked to make sure that the basic X packages are installed, such as x11-common and x11-apps and the like, which all show to be the current versions available.

So am I missing something? is this server just severely broken at this point, or have I overlooked something so minuscule that I'm not even able to see it at this point?

any help would be appreciated at this point.

Thanks guys!

Hi,

has the server xauth installed?

Greets.

yes it does (and from what i can tell, it has the whole time so far)

ok, we've finally nailed down the solution to this weirdness. I am just posting the solution here just in case anybody in the future may have a similar problem and in hopes that this thread may end up being helpful at some point.

after getting a new set of eyes on this issue, we just happened to check the running processes to see exactly what X was doing, using: ps aux | grep X and were stunned when we saw the following process running:

/usr/bin/X11/X -nolisten tcp

after toiling around and looking for where in the world this process came from, we finally located the culprit string in the file: /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc and subsequently deleted the -nolisten tcp flag from the line. restarting X spawned a clean process, and the machine forwards X just fine now.

Try this...

chris71mach1 -nolisten tcp is pretty much the standard way now for starting X and it shouldn't have affected your X11 forwarding in ssh. I run with -nolisten tcp and it works fine. I wonder if your ssh X forwarding is really turned on (did you restart the ssh server after turning it on in the sshd_config), I'd bet your path to X isn't going back over your ssh connection.