Pennysmalls

I needed to install X on a remote fedora machine, and then use my local machine as the X server over ssh. Compiling & installing X went smoothly, but I got the following error when running ssh -X (with -v for debug output) to the remote machine:

debug1: Remote: No xauth program; cannot forward with spoofing

I figured /usr/X11R6/bin needed to be in the path, but modding the path in .bash_profile, /etc/ssh/sshrc, or similar places had no effect.

It turns out that sshd has a hard wired idea of where xauth is supposed to be:

$ strings /usr/sbin/sshd|grep xauth
/usr/bin/xauth
xauthlocation
maxauthtries
No xauth program; cannot forward with spoofing.

So there you are - the solution is simple:

# ln -s /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth /usr/bin/xauth