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SSH tunnel and X forwarding Sep 30 2008 11:21AM
Malte Horst Arthur Skoruppa (malte countnumber de) (2 replies)
Hi all,

I'm having a problem setting up an SSH connection with X Forwarding in a very special setup, and hope you will be able to help me.

The setup is as follows: I live in a student residence and have a computer there named ririu. This computer isn't reachable from the outside, as the university's computer center blocks all ingoing connections to the residence from the outside.
The only reachable computer from the outside is our server in the residence, hal, for which the computer center makes an exception.

I'm now at my parent's place and want to build up an SSH connection with X Forwarding from my computer here, freya, to ririu, my computer in the residence. As hal is in the same LAN as ririu, obviously I can connect from freya to hal, and then from hal to ririu.

So I can also log in to hal and do a

malte@hal $ ssh -g -L 2508:ririu:22 malte@ririu

to build up an SSH tunnel. Then I can connect from freya to ririu using

malte@freya $ ssh -p 2508 malte@hal

This works like a charm. However, now I also want to have X Forwarding ;)

So I tried to specify -X as an additional parameter.

malte@freya $ ssh -p 2508 -X malte@hal

I do succeed in connecting to ririu. Except that the X forwarding doesn't work!

malte@ririu $ firefox
Error: no display specified
malte@ririu $ echo $DISPLAY

malte@ririu $

An X Forwarding to hal works flawlessly:

malte@freya:~$ ssh -X malte@hal
malte@hal $ echo $DISPLAY
localhost:11.0

...I can start X applications on hal and they are displayed on freya. But as you see, when I try to this from freya through an SSH tunnel from hal to ririu, the DISPLAY variable somehow gets lost. It doesn't help to randomly set the DISPLAY variable on ririu to localhost:11.0 or localhost:10.0 either, which I tried in desperation.

I hope I made it clear what the problem is, otherwise just ask :)
Do you have any idea why this isn't working? I would have assumed that ssh doesn't even notice it's running through an SSH tunnel and that this should hence work without problems. But it doesn't... so, is there any way for me to build up an ssh connection with X forwarding from freya to ririu at all?

Thanks for your help :)

[ reply ]
Re: SSH tunnel and X forwarding Oct 01 2008 01:32PM
Dirk H. Schulz (dirk schulz kinzesberg de)
Re: SSH tunnel and X forwarding Sep 30 2008 06:34PM
Greg Wooledge (wooledg eeg ccf org)







 

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