Starting an X11 client on another machine, without ssh

Michael ODonnell michael.odonnell at comcast.net
Tue Mar 23 15:18:03 EDT 2010



> It's still overkill to force X11 through the encrypted pipe.

My understanding of X leads me to believe that as long as your clients
can authenticate themselves to the server (and you've rigged your server
such that it's willing to talk to anybody, local or remote, who can open
a socket to it) then it really doesn't matter what launch mechanism (ssh,
telnet, rsh, etc) you use to reach over to the client's host in order to
launch your clients because once they're launched and they've opened their
independent socket back to the server that launch mechanism is no longer
in play, so even if it's complex or heavyweight it's only for a moment.

Of course, that puts the burden on you to setup all the authentication in
a way that's independent and will survive the launch mechanism (unlike,
say, ssh's tunnels and auth forwarding) and I'm guessing you're missing
your xon tool because it handled all of that for you.  I'd say let us
know if you find such but, AFAIC, the generality and security of SSH
make it worth the overhead...
 


More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list