xdm authority files

Michael ODonnell michael.odonnell at comcast.net
Sat Nov 1 07:42:58 EST 2003


I'm definitely not an X expert but I know enough
that I'm dangerous.  I don't run Gnome or KDE -
I launch xdm as the X session manager and ctwm
as the window manager and life is grand.

I recently grabbed the latest X download (4.3.0)
from xfree86.org and it seems to generally work OK.
One problem I'm having, though, is that when starting my
session xdm is apparently not writing the proper stuff
into my .Xauthority file in my (non-root, regular user)
home directory, which is on a locally mounted disk.

If I delete my ~/.Xauthority file before starting xdm I can
see that by the time my ~/.xsession script begins executing
a new ~/.Xauthority has been created, as expected, but it
apparently doesn't have the proper credentials to allow
me to talk to the X server.

Using ps, I can see the X server running and its command
line looks like this:

  /usr/X11R6/bin/X -auth /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/authdir/authfiles/A:0-Fw6fNB

If (as root) I manually extract the authority info from
that file, thus:

  xauth -f /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xdm/authdir/authfiles/A:0-Fw6fNB list

...it reports expected stuff like:

 #ffff##:      MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 634hoo-ha720516037hoo-ha6e41715a

...and if I then (as non-root me) introduce that authority
info into my own ~/.Xauthority thus:

  xauth add :0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 634hoo-ha720516037hoo-ha6e41715a

...I can communicate with the server as desired and
everything works great.  So I guess I'm asking if anybody
recognizes this situation and can help me get xdm to
already have the proper authority info setup when my
session is started.

Distribution: Debian "testing"
Kernel:       2.4.18



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