Solaris X Window System Developer's Guide

Allowing Access When Using MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1

If you are using the MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 authorization protocol, follow these steps to allow another user access to your server.

  1. On the machine running the server, use xauth to extract an entry corresponding to hostname:0 into a file.

    For this example, hostname is anyhost and the file is xauth.info.

    myhost%$OPENWINHOME/bin/xauth
    
    nextract - anyhost:0 >
    
    $HOME/xauth.info
    
  2. Send the file containing the entry to the user requesting access (using Mail Tool, rcp, or some other file transfer protocol).


    Note –

    Mailing the file containing your authorization information is a safer method than using rcp. If you do use rcp, do not place the file in a directory that is easily accessible by another user.


  3. The other user must merge the entry into their .Xauthority file.

    For this example, userhost merges xauth.info into their .Xauthority file.

    userhost%$OPENWINHOME/bin/xauth nmerge - <xauth.info
    

    Note –

    The auth-data is session-specific; therefore, it is valid only as long as the server is not restarted.