Re: [PLUG] Connection to x-server refused

[Bill Jonas <bill@billjonas.com>]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 10:30:44PM +0000, Arthur Alexion wrote:
> I am running RedHat 6.2, and the KDE and xfree86 versions which were part
> of the distribution. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I'm stretching here, since I've never experienced this problem myself,
but perhaps /tmp is getting cleaned out?  Or perhaps there are dotfiles
in your home directory which are getting deleted?

If I'm not mistaken, X stores a cryptographic key in some file which is
used to authenticate connections from X-enabled applications (the
"magic cookie").  It sounds as though this file is disappearing.
Unfortunately, I don't know anything more about how it works.

Perhaps as a test you could run "xhost +localhost" when it acts up again
and see if you can start X programs then.  Use this only for testing
purposes, though, because it allows anyone logged into your machine to
start X applications on your $DISPLAY, even if they aren't you.  A
better way, actually, is to use the xauth program, but I don't really
know the syntax for that.

Hmm, I entered the xauth command with no arguments at the command prompt
and it gave me the the following:
$ xauth
Using authority file /home/bj/.Xauthority
xauth>

Looking at that file, it contained the string "MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1" no
less than twelve times.  On a hunch, I did the following:
$ grep -r MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 /tmp 2>/dev/null
/tmp/dcopMqzdau:remove protoname=ICE protodata="" netid=local/epoch:/tmp/.ICE-unix/17701 authname=MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
/tmp/dcopMqzdau:remove protoname=DCOP protodata="" netid=local/epoch:/tmp/.ICE-unix/17701 authname=MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1

/tmp/.ICE-unix/17701 is a Unix domain socket...
$ ls -l /tmp/.ICE-unix/17701
srwxrwxrwx    1 bj       bj              0 Jul 28 15:01 /tmp/.ICE-unix/17701

And the date and time correspond to the last time I believe I started X.
('ps -aux' confirms that suspicion -- all the X infrastructure show
starting dates of Jul28.)

Are you sure it isn't a misconfigured cron job that deletes everything,
say, three days old or older?

-- 
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
"As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,  we should
be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and
this we should do freely and generously."          -- Benjamin Franklin


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