Solved Xauthority why?

[fredvs]

Hello.

What is .Xauthority for?

After creating new users, there are some error messages when running startx. =>

unable to write random state.
xauth: file /root/-serverauth.639 does not exist
auth:timeout

And X refuse to load.

I have then edited /usr/local/bin/startx and change =>

enable_xauth=1

into

enable_xauth=0

And now, after startx, X is loaded perfectly and fast, without any error message for all users.

So the question is: what is the utility of .Xauthority and if set to enable_xauth=0, what could be wrong ?

Thanks.

Fre;D

 

[kpa]

Xauthority was originally written to have some form of access control to the X server. Before it existed it was possible to take a look at anyone's screen by just contacting the IP address of the machine running the X server. This was of course in the pre-NAT and pre-firewall days of internet when everyone had to have a public IP address to have internet connectivity and packet filters didn't really exist yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_authorization

 

[fredvs]

Xauthority was originally written to have some form of access control to the X server. Before it existed it was possible to take a look at anyone's screen by just contacting the IP address of the machine running the X server. This was of course in the pre-NAT and pre-firewall days of internet when everyone had to have a public IP address to have internet connectivity and packet filters didn't really exist yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_authorization

Hello kpa and thanks for answer.

Huh, so disabling Xauthority is not a crime ?
Because without it, life is much fun and faster...

Fre;D

 

[kpa]

It's not a crime but you have a misconfiguration somewhere or a missing port if it doesn't work like expected.

 

[fredvs]

but you have a misconfiguration somewhere

Indeed, there was something wrong and the last trick of protocelt and wblock@ solves it.
=> chmod 1777 /var/tmp (+ chmod 1777 /tmp)

Now .Xauthority is not angry anymore, I can startx (with enable_xauth=1) for all users.

Hum, should I keep enable_xauth=1 (because it is by default) or use enable_xauth=0 (because X loads faster) ?

Will see...

Many thanks for help.

Fre;D