emmby

When you ssh to another server do you run into the following warning message?

Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding

It's nothing serious but it can be annoying if you're OCD like I am. It's simply telling you that you don't have your ~/.Xauthority file set up properly.

All you need to do to fix it is create a magic cookie using mcookie if you have it.

mcookie | sed -e 's/^/add :0 . /' | xauth -q

If you're a mac user like me you won't have mcookie. Instead, just do the following:

dd if=/dev/random count=1 | openssl md5 | sed -e 's/^/add :0 . /' | xauth -q

Then make sure the cookie creation was successful

> xauth list
mc02136d0.tmodns.net/unix:0 MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 ...

The next time you ssh to a remote machine you won't see the dreaded warning.


References

• http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-X-Apps-6.html
• http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2004-10/msg00236.html