Setting up X11 forwarding on SDF

Please note that MetaARPA membership is required to run X11 applications

This should be the preferred method of running X. By tunneling through an existing ssh connection, extra firewall ports or port forwarding is not needed. The traffic is also protected by ssh. Note that this tutorial references sverige.freeshell.org however iceland.freeshell.org is also available to MetaARPA members and supports X forwarding.

• Install and run an X server such as Xming.
• ssh to sverige.freeshell.org with ssh -X user@sverige.freeshell.org.
• Note: If you see an error just after connecting that xauth is missing, try adding an option to the ssh command: ssh -o XAuthLocation=`which xauth` -X user@sverige.freeshell.org.
• Putty users should use sverige.freeshell.org as the Host Name and change the Port to 443:

• Then click on the little “+” besides “SSH” on the left list, click on “X11” and tick the “Enable X11 forwarding” box:

• Click Open, login then run xeyes and play
• Running “xhost +localhost” on the local machine may be needed.

The advantage of sending X11 traffic directly is performance (screen updates) should be slightly faster because the data is not encrypted first. The disadvantage of sending X11 traffic directly is the data is not encrypted first. The X client will send the traffic directly to the local X server, so care must be taken to open up firewalls and forward the ports 6000/TCP – 6063/TCP as necessary.

• Open an xterm on your computer
• Run ‘xhost +’ to enable server access
• Run ‘ssh -X -p443 userid@sverige.sdf.org’ where ‘userid’ is your SDF user id

• Run export DISPLAY=`echo $SSH_CLIENT|awk '{print $1}'`:0.0
• Run xeyes and play

The above methods no longer seem to be working, but you can still use x11 via SSH on the MetaArray. The command to do this is ssh -Y userid@ma.sdf.org, where userid is your SDF user id.

$Id: x11_forwarding.html,v 1.9 2016/04/19 20:53:21 sethkush Exp $ Setting up X11 forwarding on SDF - traditional link (using RCS)