X11 forwarding

Christian Brandt brandtc at psi5.com
Wed Jul 23 23:12:13 WST 2008


Instead of confusing everyone with x-server vs. dropbear-client I'll 
explain what I am actually aiming for:

I run a rather embedded simpad with local X display and a dropbear 
client on which I want to diplay a remote application running on a full 
blown ubuntu server tunneled through ssh.

Now if I had ssh instead of dropbear on the simpad I could run xterm by 
entering on the simpad: ssh -X server xterm - ssh gets a command line, 
sets up a tunnel and sets $DISPLAY on the ubuntu machine in a sane way. 
But dropbear doesn't...

Dropbear seems to miss the "-X" option and offers nothing in exchange:

brandtc at sword:/tmp/dropbear-0.51$ grep X11 options.h
/* Enable X11 Forwarding - server only */
#define ENABLE_X11FWD
/* The command to invoke for xauth when using X11 forwarding.
#define XAUTH_COMMAND "/usr/X11R6/bin/xauth -q"
#ifndef ENABLE_X11FWD
#define DISABLE_X11FWD
         defined(ENABLE_AGENTFWD) || defined(ENABLE_X11FWD)

So could use X without tunneling like this:
simpad:~$ xhost +
simpad:~$ ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.db server
server:~$ export DISPLAY=simpad:0.0
server:~$ firefox &

ugly and insecure... alternatively I could write an incredible complex 
script which sources the simpad xauth-key, adds it to the 
server-xauth-keys and build his own tunnel for X11... oh the horror... I 
haven't done that for nearly 15 years...

Any ideas?

Christian Brandt




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