x11 forwarding

[matchbox]

I'm having a problem with what I think is x11 forwarding. I reguarly ssh from my iMac (running Jaguar) at home to my Linux box at work and then remote display programs such
as kmail back to my iMac. Last week I had to reboot my iMac after installing some software and when it came back up and I restarted X11 on the iMac I noticed that the prompt had changed in an xterminal. It used to be the IP number of the machine (I have comast broadband service so have DHCP) and now was the computer name. I then ssh'd into my Linux machine at work. When I tried to start up a program to remote display, it failed with an error something like cannot connect to remote display. Note that I am able to ssh back from my Linux machine to my iMac. The sysadmin at work claims nothing has changed in the Linux environment at work, and I know that I changed nothing in the system running on my iMac. So what happened to x11 forwarding?

thanks-

 

[btoneill]

On the remote linux machine what do you get when you run 'echo $DISPLAY'. It should list one of 3 things, your IP address, your hostname, or localhost. Each of these should be followed by a ':' and number dot number. (aka localhost:10.0 or 1.2.3.4:10.0). If what is returned is blank run ssh with the -X option, and try again. If the IP address it displays is not the IP that you were given by comcast, try running ssh with '-b 1.2.3.4' where 1.2.3.4 is the IP address that you were given by comcast.

Brian

 

[scruffy]

If you use X11 forwarding over ssh (the -X option), then the $DISPLAY variable in your Linux login should be on the Linux machine, not on the OS X machine.