SSH forwarding of X question

Bart Silverstrim bsilver at chrononomicon.com
Thu Jul 19 03:11:45 UTC 2007



Brett Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 13:18 -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
>> ssh -X -C myusername at spider-man-network.com
>>
>> I log in, execute mozilla-firefox.  After a pause, firefox pops up.  go 
>> to a web page.  Go to file->print.  The printers available to 
>> Spider-Man, I get the printers installed on Superman here.
> 
> The printer issue is likely a red-herring :o)
> 
> You're likely already running a local copy of firefox on "superman".
> The firefox script will look for a local copy of itself on whatever X
> server your DISPLAY points to.  If one is running, it will open the URL
> on that firefox instance, rather than running a remote instance and
> displaying it.  So, despite running the "mozilla-firefox" script on
> "Spider-man", the URL actually was opened by the firefox-bin instance
> that was already running on "Superman".  Does that make sense?

The explanation, yes.  Why?  I don't know.  I would have thought the 
remote machine couldn't (or at least not easily) see the local machine's 
running programs.  I wouldn't even *want* it to.  When I ssh into a 
remote machine, I want to use *it's* resources.

But it's not going to solve anything to b*tch about implementation 
details here.

Thanks to everyone that replied!  This "glitch" is rather enlightening.

-Bart




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