[Bug 338] X11 forwarding no longer works after upgrading from 2.9.9p2 to 3.4p1

[bugzilla-daemon at mindrot.org]

http://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338

jrj at purdue.edu changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |FIXED



------- Additional Comments From jrj at purdue.edu  2002-07-11 05:50 -------
I figured out the problem.

The real culprit is, of all things, the version of bash that Sun now
releases.  The ./configure script tries to find a "good" shell to use.
On one of my machines (2.6) I had stupidly created a /bin/bash symlink
and it found that ahead of /bin/ksh.  On one of my Solaris 8 machines it
found the Sun version.  On all the others I had forced ./configure to use
/bin/ksh or it found it first on its own.  Those mismatches, of course,
led to all sorts of confusion as it appeared to me xauth was running OK.

In either case, bash is not capable of finding xauth properly with the
code that's in ./configure.  I added some debugging code and it does
something like this:

  Looking for /bin/xauth
  Looking for /usr/bin/xauth
  Looking for /usr/local/bin/xauth
  ...
  Looking for /usr/openwin/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:.../xauth

It's clearly having trouble breaking $PATH apart, and, as luck would
have it, the problem is with the last element, which is where it puts
/usr/openwin/bin to look for xauth.  Sigh.

Bash was also was causing me other problems, which is why on most of my
machines I put "CONFIG_SHELL=/bin/ksh" in the ./configure environment.
Had I remembered to do that everyplace, I wouldn't have gone down this
twisty path.

The other two solutions to this (--with-xauth and XAuthLocation) should
both work, but only fix the xauth discovery issue.  I'd be real suspicious
of other things bash was messing up, though.

I tried to add some code to ssh.c to detect when xauth was missing,
which might have speeded up diagnosing this, but it got more complicated
than I wanted to spend time on.

You don't appear to have a text file documenting OS specific issues, but I
suggest a note someplace warning Solaris builders to stay away from bash.




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