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X11/SSH issues "wrong authentication"

rated 0 times [ 2] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 32675 / 3 Years ago, wed, may 26, 2021, 3:14:02

I've been having issues getting X11 to work lately - several hours of googling and trying various fixes have got me nowhere. Here's the specifics:

I am trying to log in to a department computer from my laptop via ssh -X over the local network. X11 worked perfectly for quite some time, then all of a sudden I started getting the error message: X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication

I have tried about 6 different things to remedy this. I thought I had it working last week by modifying my local copy of /etc/ssh/ssh_config, specifically I uncommented the line ForwardX11Trusted yes. This apparently was a fluke because now it isn't working again

I have also tried adding my MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE to the remote machine using xauth add, but this hasn't seemed to work.

Tried everything here, in particular I have permissions for .Xauthority and my discs are nowhere near full (local and remote).

Here are the outputs of my various environment variables and so forth:

$ echo $DISPLAY # local machine 

:0.0



$ echo $DISPLAY # remote machine

localhost:10.0



$ xauth list # local

laptop/unix:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 45f1f58762e8040da75508d23df6819e



$ xauth list # remote

# blank

I image this last one is the key, but repeated attempts at xauth add on the remote machine don't seem to change this.

Any ideas? Let me know if I can provide any more outputs. Thanks!

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1 Year ago

answered 3 Years ago dileble · Accepted Answer

This ended up being an Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation was true:

$ df -H

Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on

grad2:/u6/#username   247G   113G   121G  49% /u6/#username

Looks like I have tons of room, right? Well, turns out I actually have a quota on that disc, which turned out to be full:

$ quota

Disk quotas for user #username (uid #####): 

     Filesystem  blocks   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace

grad2:/u6/#username

            1698264  1700000 1700000           12742       0       0

Cleared out a few files, had the admin increase the quota, and viola: X11 works again. Why on earth couldn't it have a useful error message like "cannot start X11 because your quota/disc is full"?? I probably wasted 5 hours on this.